Chapter 3. Do birds of a feather play football together? 71 attainment and occupational status, can perpetuate or intensify unequal meeting opportunities, and also serve as fruitful bases for interethnic prejudice. (McPherson et al., 2001) Effectively testing various of these mechanisms requires complex and dynamic data on large network structures and a wide range of time variant individual level variables, which, unfortunately, is well beyond the scope and possibilities of this study. However, an interesting next step from this study would be to study the effect of club compositions on dropout. Homophily is both driven by tie-formation and tie-dissolution, but the latter topic has enjoyed much less attention (McPherson et al., 2001). Comparing levels of ethnic segregation in membership with the effect of ethnic group sizes in clubs on dropout could help us in further understanding the extent to which segregation of groups and between groups is a product of unequal meeting opportunities or a consequence of interethnic relations and differences in group members’ willingness and unwillingness to connect with in and outgroup members - described by McPherson & Smith-Lovin (1987) as choice homophily.
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