Comparative Research On Current Situation Of Social Network Of Two Kinds Of Reservoir Immigrants

In recent years, the immigration problem has become the focus of research in academic circles. As one of the subjects which have the closest relationship with our social life reality, sociology is paying more and more attention to it . After making a comprehensive survey of the domestic research on the reservoir immigrants ,we can conclude that it mainly concentrates on the following three aspects: the first is to serve our policy . In order to do it well, we must try our best to make the immigration work scientific,standardized and regulatory. We must have something to go by when we do the immigration work such as formulation of policy and laws; formulation and implementation of the programs of immigrants' arrangement and economic development; carry-out and management of moving plan of immigrants; checking, assessment and support in later period after immigrants' arrangement. The second is to discuss the studies about the ways of immigrants' arrangement, social integration and patterns of the immigration from the angle of sociology and demography, or to explain and analyze the immigrants' motives and mood according to the "push-pull" theory. The third is to study economic development and environmental capacity of immigrants from the economical angle. However, most of these studies are expounded from the economic, cultural and environmental aspects and very few is from the aspect of social network. In consideration of the unique tradition that the personal relations are emphasized in Chinese society, the network of social relations always exists in the process of people's social life in different ways and runs through the whole process, therefore it plays a very important role in each individual's existence and development. Just from such a point of view, this article tries to make a comparative research on the two kinds of reservoir immigrants in the area of yong'xiu county, Jiang'xi province(the immigrants of the Three Gorges and Xin'an river) and find out the similarities and differences between the two kinds of immigrants by adopting the methods of sampling and questionnaire survey in some aspects: such as social network range, social network composition and density etc.This research is on the basis of author's on-the-spot investigation for two months (from the 31th of May to the 31th of July ,2004) and under the guidance of the correlative theories of social network. At last, the relevant measures can be put forward by analyzing the influential factors and probing into the effect of social network on the immigrants' adaptability to life .The research results show that as far as the social networks of the two kinds of immigrants are concerned, the two social network ranges are both a little small; both the social network varieties and compositions are almost the same, and the homogeneous between the two kinds of social networks is very high meanwhile, the heterogeneous is very low. It is more important that although the immigration of the two kinds of people happened in different periods(the time of the immigration of Xin'an river was 32 years earlier than the Three Gorges), the results of survey show that the social network range of Xin'an river immigrants is smaller than that of the Three-Gorges immigrants, but the former's density is a bit higher than the latter's.