The social lives of children

Researchers put RFID chips on students in a grade school in Lyon, France, and observed their social interactions for a day. Lunch and recess are particularly cool.

(h/t Scott McClurg)

Can you make your friends' friends fat by gaining weight?

Dave Johns at Slate has written a rather good article about an important debate in the social sciences. The article starts by describing some of the cooler networks research of James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, which examines the "contagion" of personal behavior through our social networks. Fowler and Christakis, for example, note that if you're overweight, your friends will tend to be overweight, as will their friends. Same thing if you're divorced; you will tend to have divorced friends, and those friends will tend to have divorced friends. Same thing if you vote. Or if you're happy. Or lonely. And so on. Now, it's one thing to note these correlations, but Fowler and Christakis go on to suggest causality, such that your decision to lose weight can affect your friends, your friends' friends, and other people you don't even know. It's a cool concept, and it was initially embraced by the media (James even went on Colbert), but now there's a blowback within academic and journalistic circles, which Johns details.

I don't wish to weigh in on the statistical debate -- those with far better qualifications than mine are doing that just fine. But I think it worth mentioning that this whole debate is dealing with a topic that is absolutely essential to social network research and to a lot of other areas in the social sciences. The topic is homophily, which is simply a way of saying that birds of a feather tend to flock together. It is an easy enough concept to grasp, but it's very, very difficult to deal with it in actual research.

Let's say that your decision to lose weight actually affects those around you. That's not too hard to believe; we can be inspired by people we know. So there's an effect. But how do we measure that effect separate from people's tendency to hang out with other people who are like them? That is, people who are likely to try to lose weight will tend to be friends with other people who have the same interest. That's not influence, it's homophily. How do we measure the influence on top of the homophily?

Similarly, Democrats tend to be friends with other Democrats. That's not because people are deeply political (for the most part, they're not), and it's not that Democrats are convincing their friends to become Democrats, although that may happen on the margins. It's just that if you're a Democrat, you're probably hanging out in places where Democrats tend to hang out. You probably live in a city rather than a suburb (which is where the Republicans are hanging out with other Republicans), you probably live in a walkable neighborhood and frequent the types of bars and restaurants that exist in such neighborhoods, you probably hold the kind of job that Democrats tend to hold, etc. You're not intentionally selecting a Democratic lifestyle, nor are you necessarily trying to turn your friends Democratic. You just pick the lifestyle you're comfortable with, and it turns out that most others who pick that lifestyle tend to share your political beliefs. Lo and behold, the population from which you pick your friends tends to be filled with Democrats.

If that's the case, then how do we measure social influence? It's really not easy. But it's probably the biggest question we're dealing with right now in networks studies.

Social networking media, cultural imperialism, and gender

Sociology grad student Sarah has an interesting post up at Facile Gestures that makes some important points about social networking media. One key point is about the coverage of the role that Facebook, Twitter, and other U.S.-generated media played in the Arab Spring and other social movements:

[T]there is a imperialist undertone to the notion that the uprisings could not have occurred without these social media platforms. By placing US-centric, English language platforms at the center of reportage on Middle Eastern unrest, we colonize the revolutions and claim them as victories of our own. Look at these tools of freedom we have created, we say, pointing towards our own techno-social accomplishments and feeling heroic that we provided such a space. This not only elides the fact that a significant proportion of political organizing outside the Western world happens outside of the services that we are most familiar with, but also diminishes our understanding of the relationship between online communication, political action, and information sharing outside the confines of those platforms we’ve deemed to be "important."

Exactly. While this is often done without malice, just offering us a way to understand foreign social movements in familiar terms, the result is to give us credit for something in which we played a very, very small role. (Given the larger role our country has played in supporting the targets of these revolutions, one can certainly understand our interest in feeling like we're on the side of the good guys.)

Sarah makes another interesting point with regards to gender:

We know that the feminist blogosphere runs a secondary parallel to the mainstream progressive blogosphere. Twitter — when not being used for celebrity gossip (an eminently female pursuit) — is the outlet for male dominated news outlets, mainstream or otherwise, to make their voices relevant. Facebook, though more personal and thus less likely to carry with it the gendering that comes with journalistic engagement, appears in the news as a gathering place for social movements gendered masculine by their leaders and tactics.

She contrasts these sites with LiveJournal, which is dominated by women. While LiveJournal is generally not listed among the sites facilitating political activity, it plays an important role in doing precisely that outside the United States.

I was thinking a lot about this topic during an impromptu "summit" of political scientist bloggers and their journalist counterparts at APSA last summer. It was hard not to notice that our group was overwhelmingly white, male, and young (defined as "≤ my current age"), and at least 50% Jewish. To be sure, this was hardly an unbiased sample of such bloggers, and we're drawn from a somewhat skewed population to begin with.

Nonetheless, women make up a substantial percentage of younger political scientists. Either a lot of these women are doing some political blogging in one form or another and we male bloggers just aren't aware of it, or they're declining to blog. I'm not sure if there's something particularly gendered about blogging in general. (I think a lot of us were computer nerds in high school, and that tends to draw a largely male population, as well, but that doesn't really answer the question.) I'm open to ideas on this.

(h/t John McMahon)

Informal influences on legislators

Recently, I've been plugging my seating paper, in which I find that California legislators sitting next to each other can influence each others' votes.  Well, in their working paper "Friends in High Places," Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy take this a step or two further and find a similar effect in the U.S. Senate.  Senators sitting near each other, they find, tend to vote similarly.  (I'm not sure to what degree freshman senators get to pick their seats, so there may be some endogeneity issues there, but still an interesting finding.) They also find that college alumni networks help explain voting patterns among senators.

When the networkers passed the Canadians

Below is a graph of APSA membership numbers for two sections, Political Networks (represented by a network plot) and Canadian Politics (represented by Celine Dion).  I am the membership chair for the former.  Our section's exceptional growth has unfortunately earned me a second term.

The ultimate political networks graph

James Moody and Peter Mucha presented some of their recent research on party polarization at the most recent political networks conference at Duke this past spring.  Their presentation included the following graph, which uses agreement scores between members of the U.S. Senate to demonstrate polarization over time.  As the graph suggests, polarization in the Senate is at near historic levels, although there was a slight increase in cross-partisan agreement during Bush's second term.

Regardless, the graph is extremely cool.  (h/t Jennifer Victor)

Networks analysis on Stata

Someone finally put together a networks analysis package for Stata.  It's pretty limited so far -- it can only do circle or MDS plots -- but it has a lot of potential, and it's a lot easier to use than R (although considerably slower).  The plot at left is the hookup network for the original 90210 cast.  I made it in about two minutes.