Bott Hypothesis  The Bott Hypothesis is a thesis first advanced in Elizabeth Bott's "Family and Social Networks" (1957), one of the most influential works published in the sociology of the family. Elizabeth Bott's hypothesis holds that the connectedness or the density of a husband's and wife's separate social networks is positively associated with marital role segregation. In her "Family and Social Network" (1957), Elizabeth Bott argued that conjugal role performance is related to the density of each spouse's social networks outside the nuclear family. The data Bott used to develop this hypothesis were drawn from the study of 20 working-class, London families. Thus, according to Bott:    In other words, what she claimed is that if family members maintain ties with a network of friends or neighbors who know one another and interact apart from the family members, the members of these external social networks can develop norm consensus and exert pressure on the network's members. When members of close-knit networks marry and when they continue to be drawn into network activities after marriage, they can develop a clearly differentiated conjugal role organization of tasks. The external close-knit networks provide the spouses with instrumental assistance and emotional support outside the couple and they, thus, lessen conjugal interdependence and make for a segregated role organization. To support her main hypothesis, Bott also offered three corollary hypotheses:  Considered by some as one of the predecessors of network science, Bott recognized the fact that, although important, individual attributes cannot explain all the variations in family relations. Instead, she claimed that the social environment which can be visualized as a network rather than as a group can affect conjugal roles. In particular, the density of a network (the proportion of individuals with direct ties to each other) facilitates the emergence of common norms and social support making husbands and wives less likely to invest in each other. Udry and Hall (1965) tested the Bott hypothesis by using a sample of 43 middle-aged, middle-class couples, and the four people each spouse indicated most frequent contact with. However, they did not find a clear-cut relationship between role segregation and network connectedness (measured by asking members of each spouse's network how well they knew each other). Thus, they conclude that Bott's hypothesis may apply only to lower-class couples, or perhaps to middle-class couples at a particular point in the life cycle. Joel Nelson (1966) used a sample of 131 working-class women in New Haven and asked the women to list the four people they interacted with most frequently and how often they saw at least two of them at the same time.