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Group identities shape how individuals understand themselves and orient social behaviour. Group identities are built on different levels. On the largest scale they are built on established social categories such as gender, race, or nationality. On the smallest scale they emerge in informal groups that are built in specific social contexts through everyday interactions.
Sociological research has focused primarily on studying identification with established social categories. Less is known about how identification develops within informal, overlapping groups that emerge from everyday interaction. This study examines identification with emerging social groups that are perceived and reported by individuals in the context of a newly established community of engineering undergraduate students in Switzerland. The study integrates social identity theory with relational approaches to social structure.
We conceptualize identification as an evaluative orientation toward group membership shaped by interdependent social processes rather than by individual attributes or dyadic ties alone. Using network autocorrelation models that account for interaction-based dependence and correlated outcomes induced by overlapping group memberships, we assess relational, experiential, and contextual mechanisms of identification.
The results show that identification is systematically patterned by multiple, interacting dimensions of social organization. Relational interdependence through interaction ties and locally defined norms, cognitively mediated environments arising from overlapping group memberships, and experiential evaluations all contribute independently to variation in identification. In addition, the activities organizing group life differentiate contexts of identification, indicating that groups function as distinct social situations rather than interchangeable containers for social ties.
Together, these findings advance a sociological account of identification grounded in everyday social structure and demonstrate how identity processes can be systematically linked to relational and contextual interdependence in informal group settings.
