ABSTRACT
When J. S. Rarnes (1954) decided that the social relations of Norwegian villagers extended beyond the boundedness of groups and introduced the network concept to describe an unbounded set of social relations, he made possible a view of individuals both born into a web of preexisting social ties and at the same time capable of constructing some aspects of their own personal social worlds. This dynamic tension—between the constraints of social structure and the social curiosity of the human organism—underlies much of the research focused on personal social networks. One way to better understand the choices and constraints operating on individuals enmeshed in evolving network relations is to examine those relations as they exist early in these people’s lives, when they are young children.
