Staying in Place, Staying Connected: Exploring Tie-Retention to Inform Network-Based Health Interventions in Public Housing Communities

The COVID‑19 pandemic disrupted human relationships through public health distancing mandates and migration shifts. These changes had the potential to be especially disruptive in public housing, which are government‑funded developments for housing low‑income, frequently mobile, populations. In light of these social upheavals, our goal is to leverage this natural experiment to understand the persistence of relationships, measured as ties in social networks, within disadvantaged public housing communities. We develop a predictive model of relationship maintenance, what we call ego-alter tie-retention, using data from an egocentric longitudinal survey of 187 adults residing in two Boston public‑housing developments. Baseline data were collected between March 2019 and 2020. Our outcome variable is tie-retention (yes vs. no) of each reported tie at approximately 1 year post baseline. Predictors include the degree to which different types of tie overlap (multiplexity), tie‑strength measures (frequency of contact, shared meals, closeness, years known, relationship type, residence), individual ego and alter attributes (age, education, employment, caregiver status), and homophily of relationships (based on gender, Hispanic ethnicity, housing category, caregiver status, sugar‑sweetened beverage/food consumption, self‑rated health, education, smoking). Multilevel hierarchical logistic regression with penalized quasi‑likelihood estimation was used, and model fit was compared via Akaike information criterion. The best fitting model includes multiplexity, longer relationship duration, shared (i.e., homophilous) educational background, and ego-level smoking (AIC = 519.2). These findings have implications for the design of social network-based interventions in public housing contexts. Leveraging durable, homophilous social ties may achieve greater intervention longevity and reach in similar low‑income urban settings.