By Monica Lee and Bogdan State

In an increasingly mobile world, Facebook is an important way many fathers and children connect with one another. So on this Father's Day, we celebrate fathers by analyzing over 141 million father-child relationships in 28 countries that are maintained in part on Facebook. Specifically, we look at fathers' and childr...en's distance from one other geographically and communicatively. We find that children tend to move away from their fathers as they grow up, and that middle-aged children communicate more with their fathers on Facebook than do other age groups. Analyzing the distance between fathers and children inspires us to think about how we can know fathers better. So we conclude with a brief look at the cultural interests of fathers on Facebook. Perhaps it can serve as next year's Fathers' Day shopping guide for those of us who don't keep in touch with Dad as much as we should.

Geographical Distance from Dad

First, we looked at how far from their fathers children at different ages live. Unsurprisingly, most children seem to move away from home in their twenties. Children in their teens tend to live very close to their fathers, whereas children in their twenties and thirties are increasingly likely to live far away from their parents.

Once they reach their mid thirties, however, daughters' likelihood of living far from their fathers stabilizes; sons' likelihood does as well, but it rises once again as they reach their late 50s. Overall, fathers and daughters stay geographically closer to one another than fathers and sons. Fathers and daughters live, on average, just under 800 km apart when daughters settle into their adult homes during their mid-thirties. By comparison, fathers and sons live just under 1000 km apart as the sons reach their mid-thirties.


Communicating with Dad

Next, we examined how much fathers and children of different ages interact with each other. It turns out that communicative distance tends to contrast geographical distance. Below is the public messaging rate (comments and posts as a percentile score) between fathers and children over three months.

While geographical distance between fathers and children is greater among children who are in their twenties and thirties than among teenagers, father-child Facebook interaction rates are also greater. In general, fathers and daughters keep in touch more than fathers and sons do. For nearly every age group, the interaction rate between fathers and daughters is around 5% higher than that between fathers and sons. Interaction is most frequent for father-daughter pairs where the daughter is around 40 years old; at this age the average daughter's interaction rate with her father is near the 59th percentile. Interaction is most frequent for father-son pairs where the son is around 50 years old; at this age the average son's interaction rate with her father is near the 53rd percentile.


What to get Dad on Fathers' Day

As children get older, they become more likely to live far away from their fathers, and maybe few children keep in touch with Dad as much as they'd like. So it's no surprise that finding a good Fathers' Day gift is always difficult. But data science might help us figure out what to get dad this year. In the space of this blog post, it's hard for us to say much about your dad in particular, but there are certain things that dads in the U.S. tend to agree on. Listed below are the top ten music, movie, TV, sports, and entertainment pages most liked by dads in the following age groups, where number of likes is normalized by the page's overall popularity among U.S. users.

U.S. dads in their 30s are much more likely to enjoy contact sports, action-packed TV shows, and familial humor than the average American. Dads in their 40s tend to also enjoy sports and familial humor, but in addition, they disproportionately like Hard Rock Music—bands from the 1980s when they were youths. Accordingly, Classic Rock bands from the 70s dominate the interest list of dads in their 50s, who also seem to like Western movies and golf. Westerns and golf are also popular among dads in their 60s, who in contrast tend to like Blues-y and Southern Rock from the 1960s and early 1970s. U.S. dads in their 70s disproportionately enjoy Country music, Western movies, and Christian topics. Finally, dads in their 80s are much like those in their 70s—Country music and Christian faith. So depending on your dad's age, maybe you should get him some football tickets, concert tickets, golf clubs, a CD or music gift certificate, or a John Wayne DVD box set...?

by Winter Mason, Funda Kivran-Swaine, Moira Burke, and Lada Adamic.

Over the past few months, many people have been challenging one another to share on Facebook the things for which they are most grateful. So, for example, one friend might challenge another to “write 3 things you are thankful for over the next 5 days.”...

by Ta Virot Chiraphadhanakul, Solomon Messing, Alex Peysakhovich, and Sean J. Taylor

(Facebook Core Data Science Team)

When Burkina Faso beauty salon owner Korotimi Sere needed a loan, she had few options. For Korotimi and millions like her in Sub-Saharan Africa, getting a conventional loan is nearly impossible--80% of...

With the 2014 midterm elections approaching, we decided to take a look at the cultural similarities and differences between people who support Democrats and people who support Republicans. To do this, we looked at everyone who liked the campaign page of any Democrat or Republican running for governor, U.S. Senate or U.S. House of Representatives. W...e then looked at what other pages those people liked on Facebook and identified the pages that were most differentiating—that is, the pages which were disproportionately liked by the supporters of one party versus the other—and those that were most balanced.

Note: in all of the figures below, the more a page is disproportionately liked by fans of Republican candidates, the farther right the page name appears (precisely indicated by the darker line in the middle). Conversely, the more a page is disproportionately liked by fans of Democratic candidates, the farther left the page name appears. The font size of the name is proportional to the total number of people from the US who liked that page.

By Solomon Messing, Annie Franco, Arjun Wilkins, Dustin Cable, and Matthew Warshauer

During each U.S. election cycle, the Data Science Team looks at civic engagement surrounding the election. This year, we’ll look at the issues candidates are talking about on their Facebook pages and how people respond.

...

by Mike Develin and Adrien Friggeri, Facebook Data Science

For years, parents have been naming their children in clever, or, if you feel less charitable, "clever" ways. This dates at least all the way back to Roman times, where the twins Romulus and Remus share more than just genes and a wolf-mother: their names themselves bear obvious typographical... and phonetic resemblance.

This trend is alive and well today. Roger Clemens loved strikeouts so much that he named his children all starting with the letter K. It's sad to imagine the Kardashian family helplessly struggling to name its children in a world missing that same letter. The winner in this department, however, has to be boxer George Foreman, who famously named all five of his sons George.

How common is this alliteration? It turns out to be quite significant. We looked at pairs of siblings on Facebook who both live in the United States, and found that at all ages, they had a much higher likelihood of having the same first initial: 

As you can see, a pair of siblings has about an 11% chance of having the same first initial, compared to about 7% as we'd expect from random chance (if their first names were independently drawn from the pool of all users of their respective ages). This trend does not appear to be fluctuating much over time; the late-teens drop is due to a cultural phenomenon where best friends of that age will often list each other as siblings.

When we examine the most common pairs of sibling names, we see even more similarity, and other themes emerge. These are the pairs of sibling names that occur most often compared to random chance (that is, # of pairs / # of expected pairs if names are random within their age):

1. Yvette-Yvonne: 37.4 times as often as expected
2. Faith-Hope: 31.4
3. Charity-Faith: 24.3
4. Jami-Jodi: 23.8
5. Gretchen-Heidi: 22.0
6. Charity-Hope: 21.2
7. Kelli-Kerri: 18.9
8. Latasha-Latoya: 18.5
9. Eileen-Maureen: 18.4
10. Colleen-Maureen: 17.0 

11-20: Cesar-Oscar, Landon-Logan, Edgar-Oscar, Blair-Blake, Tammi-Terri, Adriana-Alejandra, Dalton-Dillon, Autumn-Summer, Edgar-Omar, Juana-Maria

21-30: Trent-Trevor, Kory-Kyle, Trent-Troy, Brendan-Colin, Eduardo-Jorge, Javier-Jorge, Garrett-Grant, Kathleen-Maureen, Jesus-Jose, Chance-Chase

The patterns are striking. There are two categories of non-typographical associations: names associated with the same ethnicity, and the Faith-Hope-Charity trinity of virtuous names. Aside from these (and even within the coethnic names) it's extreme typographical and phonetic similarity, even above and beyond having the same first initial. It looks like the entire country, at least on this front, is keeping up with the Kardashians.

You may have noticed an unusual sawtooth pattern in the graph above, along with a spike for young ages. These both come from a set of siblings that's even more sibling than ordinary siblings: twins! Romulus and Remus are just one in a series of twin pairs with similar names. Compared to the 11% rate for siblings and the 7% expected random-chance rate, twins have a much higher chance of having the same first initial (surprisingly, looking at the gender rates, this is only slightly higher for same-gender and thus for identical twins):

Interestingly, this rate has gone down quite a bit over the last 40 years, but many twins are still saddled with the same first initial, resulting in what is no doubt a lifetime of frustration around login names.

We close by looking at another surprising influence on name: where you live. In the state of Virginia, 46% more people are named Virginia than in the country at large; in West Virginia, it's 28% more. We see no bump in surrounding states, suggesting that it's not just cultural: either people named Virginia are drawn to these states or, perhaps more likely, parents are trying to be clever again. Oh, those parents.

All data was anonymized and aggregated. We removed cases where the siblings have the same name (sorry, Mr. Foreman, these are more likely to be multiple profiles of the same person than genuine siblings), and for the state case we adjusted for non-person user profiles (e.g. "Virginia Highway Patrol").