The Analysis of Duocentric Social Networks: A Primer

Marriages and other intimate partnerships are facilitated or constrained by the social networks within which they are embedded. To date, methods used to assess the social networks of couples have been limited to global ratings of social network characteristics or network data collected from each partner separately. In the current article, the authors offer new tools for expanding on the existing literature by describing methods of collecting and analyzing duocentric social networks, that is, the combined social networks of couples. They provide an overview of the key considerations for measuring duocentric networks, such as how and why to combine separate network interviews with partners into one shared duocentric network, the number of network members to assess, and the implications of different network operationalizations. They illustrate these considerations with analyses of social network data collected from 57 low‐income married couples, presenting visualizations and quantitative measures of network composition and structure.     

A new scalable leader-community detection approach for community detection in social networks

Studying social influence in networks is crucial to understand how behavior spreads. An interesting number of theories were elaborated to analyze how innovations and trends get adopted. The traditional view assumes that a minority of members in a society possess qualities that make them exceptionally persuasive in spreading ideas to others. These exceptional individuals drive trends on behalf of the majority of ordinary people. They are loosely described as being informed, respected, and well connected. The leaders or influential are responsible for the dissemination of information and the propagation of influence. In this paper, we propose a new scalable and a deterministic approach for the detection of communities using leaders nodes named Leader-Community Detection Approach LCDA. The proposed approach has two main steps. The first step is the leaders’ retrieval. The second step is the community detection using similarity between nodes. Our algorithms provide good results compared to ground truth membership community.     

Clearing the FOG: Fuzzy,overlapping groups for social networks

Humans are well known to belong to many associative groups simultaneously, with various levels of affiliation. However, most group detection algorithms for social networks impose a strict partitioning on nodes, forcing entities to belong to a single group. Link analysis research has produced several methods which detect multiple memberships but force equal membership. This paper extends these approaches by introducing the FOG framework, a stochastic model and group detection algorithm for fuzzy, overlapping groups. We apply our algorithm to both link data and network data, where we use a random walk approach to generate rich links from networks. The results demonstrate that not only can fuzzy groups be located, but also that the strength of membership in a group and the fraction of individuals with exclusive membership are highly informative of emerging group dynamics.     

Considering clustering measures: Third ties,means, and triplets

Measures that estimate the clustering coefficients of ego and overall social networks are important to social network studies. Existing measures differ in how they define and estimate triplet clustering with implications for how network theoretic properties are reflected. In this paper, we propose a novel definition of triplet clustering for weighted and undirected social networks that explicitly considers the relative strength of the tie connecting the two alters of the ego in the triplet. We argue that our proposed definition better reflects theorized effects of the important third tie in the social network literature. We also develop new methods for estimating triplet, local and global clustering. Three different types of mathematical means, i.e. arithmetic, geometric, and quadratic, are used to reflect alternative theoretical assumptions concerning the marginal effect of tie substitution.     

Familial groups in social networks

Many structural definitions for social community have been proposed in attempt to characterize and further understand the structure of social relationships. Algorithms using quantitative concepts such as centrality measures, spectral methods and other clustering measures have been used to compute social communities. While these methods have had much success in extracting meaningful subgroups in social and biological (and other) networks, they do not necessarily reveal the defining structure of social attraction.     

Ethnic Minority Families and Minority Gays and Lesbians

Attitudes toward sexuality differ within the diverse ethnic and racial communities that exist in the U.S., and the cultural values and beliefs surrounding sexuality play a major role in determining how individuals behave within their sociological context. The family unit is the domain where such values and beliefs are nurtured and developed. An individual's value system is shaped and reinforced within the family context which usually reflects the broader community norms. Disclosure of a gay or lesbian sexual preference and lifestyle by a family member presents challenges to ethnic minority families who tend not to discuss sexuality issues and presume a heterosexual orientation. For ethnic minority gays and lesbians the "coming out" process presents challenges in their identity formation processes and in their loyalties to one community over another. Ethnic gay men and lesbians need to live within three rigidly defined and strongly independent communities: the gay and lesbian community, the ethnic minority community, and the society at large. While each community provides fundamental needs, serious consequences emerge if such communities were to be visibly integrated and merged. It requires a constant effort to maintain oneself in three different worlds, each of which fails to support significant aspects of a person's life. The complications that arise may inhibit one's ability to adapt and to maximize personal potentials. The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction and processes between ethnic minority communities and their gay and lesbian family members. A framework for understanding the process of change, that occurs for the gay or lesbian person as they attempt to resolve conflicts of dual minority membership, is presented. Implications for the practitioner is also discussed.     

A multi-way analysis of international bilateral claims

The paper presents a new methodology aimed at detecting the modularity structure of an evolving weighted directed network, identifying communities and central nodes inside each of them, and tracking their common activity over time. The method is based on tensor factorization and it is applied to the Consolidated Banking Statistic, provided by the Bank of International Settlements. Findings show that data are well represented by three communities. The temporal pattern of each community varies according to the events involving the member nodes, showing a decrease of activities during crisis periods, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis.     

A mixed membership model-based measure for subgroup integration in social networks

Social networks analysis often involves quantifying subgroup structure in which tie density is greater among nodes in the same subgroup than between subgroups. One such measure, subgroup insularity or segregation, is the extent that subgroups are separate from each other. We introduce a new measure, γ, which is a parameter from the mixed membership stochastic blockmodel (MMSBM; Airoldi et al., 2008), and differs from many existing measures in that γ does not depend on node membership. We compare this measure to several well-known measures and use simulation studies and real data analysis to provide insight into how this measure can be used in practice.     

Unveiling the mantra. The salience of network-based community belonging in understanding the structural and agentic conditions of the migration-development nexus

There is more and more evidence that migration and development cannot be considered as two dimensions, whose nexus emerges naturally as a mantra with reciprocal advantages both in developing and in developed countries. This article investigates the theoretical framework of a migration-development nexus as a double time-dependent process of social change, at the same time embedded both in the long durée of the reproduction/innovation of social practices and in the short durée of an agent's personal reflectivity. I argue that the wide scenario of this interplay is the place for the cultural, symbolic, and moral dimensions of a migrant's membership of a network-based community, which acts as a cultural compass in determining migrants' attitudes towards the development of their home country. Strong community membership can be associated with real engagement in the development issues of members left behind (as part of the collective self), only if we assume that membership and belonging are not necessarily shaped by kinship or ethnic considerations, but vary according to the structural features of migrants' social networks – for example the way in which migrants define networks as their own communities, the results of past community memories, and how they imagine their future community on the basis of current experience and perception. The paper discusses these issues in the light of the structure-agent debate in social sciences and migration studies.     

Dynamic social media affiliations among UK politicians

Inter-personal affiliations and coalitions are an important part of politicians’ behaviour, but are often difficult to observe. Since an increasing amount of political communication now occurs online, data from online interactions may offer a new toolkit to study ties between politicians; however, the methods by which robust insights can be derived from online data require further development, especially around the dynamics of political social networks. We develop a novel method for tracking the evolution of community structures, referred to as ‘multiplex community affiliation clustering’ (MCAC), and use it to study the online social networks of Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the United Kingdom. Social interaction networks are derived from social media (Twitter) communication over an eventful 17-month period spanning the UK General Election in 2015 and the UK Referendum on membership of the European Union in 2016. We find that the social network structure linking MPs and MEPs evolves over time, with distinct communities forming and re-forming, driven by party affiliations and political events. Without including any information about time in our model, we nevertheless find that the evolving social network structure shows multiple persistent and recurring states of affiliation between politicians, which align with content states derived from topic analysis of tweet text. These findings show that the dominant state of partisan segregation can be challenged by major political events, ideology, and intra-party tension that transcend party affiliations.     

Determinants of Savings, Remittances, and Spending Patterns among U.S. Migrants in Four Mexican Communities

In this paper we attempt to overcome several weaknesses of earlier field studies of the effect of international migration on sending communities. In general, these studies fail to employ representative samples of migrants, specify theoretical models of decision-making, or control for a variety of individual and household characteristics likely to affect how migrants dispose of their earnings, including sample selectivity. Representative samples of Mexican migrants from four sending communities are used to estimate a theoretical model that controls for a variety of individual, family, and trip characteristics; other stages of the analysis also control for sample selectivity. The findings suggest that migrant decision-making is strongly and consistently determined by social capital and community membership, with other variables playing ancillary roles in different decision processes. The propensities to save, remit, and invest productively generally rose as ties to the United States increased, and were generally higher in communities with well-developed local economies.     

Producing ‘internal suspect bodies’: divisive effects of UK counter‐terrorism measures on Muslim communities in Leeds and Bradford

Research on UK government counter‐terrorism measures has claimed that Muslims are treated as a ‘suspect community’. However, there is limited research exploring the divisive effects that membership of a ‘suspect community’ has on relations within Muslim communities. Drawing from interviews with British Muslims living in Leeds or Bradford, I address this gap by explicating how co‐option of Muslim community members to counter extremism fractures relations within Muslim communities. I reveal how community members internalize fears of state targeting which precipitates internal disciplinary measures. I contribute the category of ‘internal suspect body’ which is materialized through two intersecting conditions within preventative counter‐terrorism: the suspected extremist for Muslims to look out for and suspected informer who might report fellow Muslims. I argue that the suspect community operates through a network of relations by which terrors of counter‐terrorism are reproduced within Muslim communities with divisive effects.     

A comparative study of social network models: Network evolution models and nodal attribute models

This paper reviews, classifies and compares recent models for social networks that have mainly been published within the physics-oriented complex networks literature. The models fall into two categories: those in which the addition of new links is dependent on the (typically local) network structure (network evolution models, NEMs), and those in which links are generated based only on nodal attributes (nodal attribute models, NAMs). An exponential random graph model (ERGM) with structural dependencies is included for comparison. We fit models from each of these categories to two empirical acquaintance networks with respect to basic network properties. We compare higher order structures in the resulting networks with those in the data, with the aim of determining which models produce the most realistic network structure with respect to degree distributions, assortativity, clustering spectra, geodesic path distributions, and community structure (subgroups with dense internal connections). We find that the nodal attribute models successfully produce assortative networks and very clear community structure. However, they generate unrealistic clustering spectra and peaked degree distributions that do not match empirical data on large social networks. On the other hand, many of the network evolution models produce degree distributions and clustering spectra that agree more closely with data. They also generate assortative networks and community structure, although often not to the same extent as in the data. The ERGM model, which turned out to be near-degenerate in the parameter region best fitting our data, produces the weakest community structure.     

Struggling for Legitimacy: Trajectories of Membership and Naturalization in the Sorting Out of Engineering Students

Situated learning theory proposed the notion of legitimate peripheral participation as central to newcomers’ trajectories toward membership in communities of practice. Left underdeveloped were questions of how legitimacy is conferred or denied. Leigh Star’s work suggests ways of addressing these questions by considering how identifications of participants are made on the basis of classification systems. This article examines how classification of “calculus-readiness,” tied to an identification of engineering with mathematics, shapes the activity of students, staff, and faculty involved in a diversity program at a U.S. college of engineering, and is used to organize trajectories for students in the program.     

The Social Networks of Leaders in More and Less Viable Rural Communities1

Abstract The relationship between the social networks of leaders and community viability is examined in a comparative study of leaders (N = 75) in five rural communities (population range, 1,000 to 2,500). The analysis looks at leaders' connections to organizations outside of their communities and at different kinds of linkages between leaders within their respective communities. Leaders in more and less viable communities do not differ much in characteristics such as age, education, and occupations, but the presence of women in leadership positions is associated with community viability. In addition, there is some support for the expectation that leaders in more viable communities are more likely to have formal linkages to statewide and national networks. The most important finding, however, is that the way in which leaders relate to each other in instrumental tasks within their respective communities is associated with community viability.     

A new look at clustering coefficients with generalization to weighted and multi-faction networks

In this paper we propose a new method for studying local and global clustering in networks employing random walk pairs. The method is intuitive and directly generalizes standard local and global clustering coefficients to weighted networks and networks containing nodes of multiple types. In the case of two-mode networks the values obtained for commonly considered social networks are in sharp contrast to those obtained, for instance, by the method of Opsahl (2013), and provide a different viewpoint for clustering. The approach is also applicable in questions related to the general study of segregation and homophily. Applications to existent data sets are considered.     

Who benefits from network intervention programs? TERGM analysis across ten Philippine low-income communities

Building social capital and strengthening social networks among members of low-income communities has been recommended as a potential pathway out of poverty. However, it is not clear how network-strengthening interventions and community-based programs interact with pre-existing networks and power structures. We examine the impact of one such intervention in ten low income communities in the Philippines. The intervention is a standardized program of a faith-based organization implemented in thousands of communities in multiple countries. It brings together low-income individuals in each community for 16 weekly sessions about health, income generation, and Christian values. An important but yet unmeasured goal of the intervention is the strengthening of social networks among the participants. We measured the social networks before and after the intervention and analysed their changes both separately and jointly for all ten communities with temporal exponential random graph models (TERGM). We modelled the post-intervention network structures conditioning on the pre-intervention networks, pre-intervention node attributes, and attribute changes through the intervention. We found social engagement (measured by social visits to others) to moderate most consistently the effects of the intervention across the ten communities. Those who were more socially engaged consistently strengthened their networks through the intervention. By contrast, some network mechanisms strongly diverged between the communities. In particular, religiosity was positively associated with gaining social links through this faith-based intervention in some communities and negatively in others. Similar communities may in some aspects react to the same intervention in opposite ways—a phenomenon that should be further explored through studies of larger numbers of comparable networks.     

The sequence analysis of hospitals that established social work department under fuzzy environment

This paper reviews the existing literature on hospital social work and discusses intervention strategies for improving social work practice in hospital. The objective of this study was to improve the quality of medical care. But few studies have compared social work services between different hospitals. This study describes qualitative analysis under fuzzy environment, extracts the main influencing factors and establishes a comprehensive evaluation index system. It provides comprehensive evaluation for alternative hospitals by the fuzzy clustering method. This paper proposes a new mixed fuzzy clustering algorithm on the basis of analysing the axiomatic fuzzy set (AFS) and K-means algorithm, which is not affected by some complicated parameter issues and has higher statistical validity. Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is applied for selecting the best option for each cluster and a comparative analysis is done. Results from a case study in Shanghai, China, confirm that the proposed approach is effective by using information entropy to test. By comparing AFS, K-means and C-means algorithms, the hybrid algorithm can find the two closest attributes of evaluation index of hospital social work, and the proposed approach can be easily help raise the level of hospital social work service.     

Multilevel embeddedness: The case of the global fisheries governance complex

This paper explores how bilateral and multilateral clustering are embedded in a multilevel system of interdependent networks. We argue that in complex systems in which bilateral and multilateral relations are themselves interrelated, such as global fisheries governance, embeddedness cannot be reduced to unipartite or bipartite clustering but implicates multilevel closure. We elaborate expectations for ties’ multilevel embeddedness based on network theory and substantive considerations and explore them using a multilevel ERGM. We find states’ bilateral ties are embedded in their shared membership in multilateral fisheries agreements, which is itself clustered around foci represented by similar content and treaty secretariats.     

Education,socialization and community: Coping with marginal youth in rural frontier communities in Israel

This article is an enquiry into the social and cultural phenomenon of a group of youth at risk who live in community settlements in isolated rural areas. The aim of the article is to focus upon the ambivalent views these youths at risk have regarding the above communities which were collected in twelve in-depth interviews carried out with youth counsellors, social workers and members of the families of the youths at risk in the community settlements. In the process of analyzing the data the central themes concerning social exclusion versus inclusion as well as the difficulty of defining the boundaries of the community arose. This social arena exhibits how the phenomena of youth at risk at small communities, express the discussion of the legitimate non-conformist reality about new normative boundaries of the community resulting from these adolescents' social processes. We will show how different players simultaneously act in the community in the way they deal with the youth at risk (in non-formal education, teaching and care authorities, the community) and how each of them influences the formation of the definition of its boundaries in their decision to include and embrace or to exclude and ignore the marginal youth among them. In other words not only are different social forces not operating as a consensus by virtue of the struggle they are engaged in, they are even expressing social messages that deal with the formation of the local community in its broadest and narrowest sense.