The network expression of a Roma diaspora

Although ethnographers and policy-makers have long discussed the socialization patterns of the Roma—the largest and most marginalized native ethnocultural minority in Europe—, quantitative analysis is scarce. Partially, this is due to the group’s unique combination of social closure and spatial dispersion associated to the recent massive migration waves of the Roma from Central Europe. Here, we implement a novel methodology that draws on Roma’s migration networks and ethnicity- and kin-centered social norms, which enforce a permanent contact with their close ones, often using online social media like Facebook. We combine snowball sampling and a questionnaire about four “top friends”, as ranked by the Facebook algorithm, to elicit a sociocentric network of a comparatively large group of self-identified Romanian Roma (n = 752, 96% living outside Romania). We show that the elicited network considerably resembles the social structure of the target population in terms of kinship, subethnic group membership, gender roles, and other characteristics. The detected patterns provide a quantitative evaluation of the qualitative ethnographic research on the Roma and open new avenues for research on this and other hard-to-reach populations.