Research by Laura Kurgan, Dare Brawley, Brian House, Jia Zhang, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun available here.
The word "homophily" was coined in a highly-cited 1954 essay by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton on friendship in a mixed-race housing project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The researchers were suspicious of the "familiar and egregiously misleading question: do birds of a feather flock together?"
They focused on "racial attitudes," and concluded that friendships form and persist not simply on the basis of shared identities but also thanks to shared values and beliefs.
They imagined two possible social phenomena: "a tendency for friendships to form between those who are alike in some designated respect," which they termed homophily, and a countervailing pattern, "a tendency for friendships to form between those who differ in some designated respect," termed heterophily.
The axes of likeness, they hypothesized, could run along lines of "status" (race, educational level, gender, etc) or "values or opinions."
The values that Merton and Lazarsfeld studied in Pittsburgh were not randomly chosen. It is not surprising that the issue of integration would be divisive and a deciding factor for friendships in a mixed-race housing project in 1947. Yet it is an irony of history that this highly contextually and historically specific empirical observation has subsequently been taken as a law of human behavior. The irony is further complicated by the fact that Merton and Lazarfeld never actually published the report and data from which their construction of homophily emerged, which would have complicated the simple uptake of homophily.
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