The Network Expression of a Roma Diaspora Ogáyar Marín, Francisco Javier Muntean, Vasile Gamella Mora, Juan Francisco Kovářík, Jaromír Espín Martín, Antonio Manuel Cultural traits Gender roles Migration Roma Social media We gratefully acknowledge the financial help from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie (grant agreement No. 754446, UGR Research and Knowledge Transfer Fund–Athenea3i) and the 7th Framework Programme (GA319901), the Andalusia Government (EMERGIA EMC21_00331, C.SEJ.371.UGR23), the Spanish Government (FPU17/01349, Ministerio de Universidades), Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competividad and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (PID2023-147817NB-I00, ID2019-106146GB-I00), the Basque Government (IT1461-22) and the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (21-22796S). Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Granada / CBUA Despite the longstanding debates among ethnographers and policymakers regarding the social organization of the Roma–the largest and most marginalized native ethnocultural minority in Europe–quantitative analyses are limited. This is partly due to a unique combination of social closure and spatial dispersion of most Roma groups, exacerbated by their recent massive migration from Central and Eastern Europe. Here, we implement a novel methodology that draws on Roma’s migration networks and ethnicity- and kin-centred social norms, which enforce a permanent contact with their close ones, often facilitated by online social media like Facebook. We combine snowball sampling and a questionnaire about four ‘top friends’, as ranked by the Facebook algorithm, to elicit a sociocentric network of a comparatively large group of self-identified Roma originating in a Romanian area (n = 752, 96% living outside Romania). Our analysis indicates that the elicited network displays a notable similarity to the social structure of the target population in terms of kinship, subethnic group affiliation, gender roles and other characteristics. The detected patterns provide a quantitative evaluation of the qualitative ethnographic research on the Roma, thereby opening new avenues for research on this and other hard-to-reach populations. 2025-06-10T06:58:55Z 2025-06-10T06:58:55Z 2025-05 journal article Ogáyar, F. J., Muntean, V., Gamella, J. F., Kovářík, J., & Espín, A. M. (2025). The network expression of a Roma diaspora. Global Networks, 25(3), e70013. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.70013 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/104548 10.1111/glob.70013 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/MSC/754446 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Wiley