• Preface


• PART I: The Question


• Introduction


• 1. Confidants


• PART II: The First Year


• 2. Weak- Tie Confidants


• 3. Beyond Named Confidants


• 4. Incompatible Expectations


• 5. Relevance and Empathy


• 6. Because They Were There


• PART III: Beyond Graduate Students


• 7. Empirical Generalizability


• 8. Theoretical Generalizability


• A Final Word


• PART IV: Appendices


• Appendix A: Qualitative Analysis


• Appendix B: Quantitative Analysis


• Notes


• References


• Index

Mario L. Small, Grafstein Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, is an expert on poverty, personal networks, cities, and social science methods. He is the author of Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio and Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life.

Someone To Talk To reveals the often counter-intuitive nature of social support, showing that Americans often take pains to avoid close friends and family--their "strong ties"--when deciding on whom to rely. In contrast, they often confide in "weak ties," as the need for understanding or empathy trumps their fear of misplaced trust. Amid a growing wave of big data and large-scale network analysis, Mario L. Small returns to the basic questions of who we connect with, how, and why, upending decades of conventional wisdom on how we should think about and analyze social networks.