ENDOW project maps social networks across 29 countries
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Researchers from the ENDOW project collected social network data from 50 communities in 29 countries around the world.
These communities included diverse groups such as fishers in Bangladesh and Vanuatu, farmers in India and Colombia, and pastoralists in Namibia and Argentina. Investigators asked people about support networks within their households, specifically focusing on material and immaterial aid between families. The project team then built networks showing how support moved between households in each community.
By comparing these networks to existing data, they found significant differences in social structures. These findings suggest that commonly accepted ideas about how social networks function may need to be reevaluated, offering new benchmarks for understanding the range of human social organization and its structures.
