A study of a large sociogram II. Elimination of free parameters

Abstract

A sociogram is a net in which individuals are nodes and the relations of interest are directed line segments connecting pairs of individuals. In the simplest case such a relation is characterized only by its presence or absence, e.g., “A chooses (or does not choose) B as a friend of a given rank order.” Mathematical praperties of such nets are of interest to the mathematical sociologist. If the number of individuals is very large, the properties of interest are statistical properties. Here it is shown that two parameters (whose values are obtainable directly from the data) are sufficient to describe certain features of sociograms of junior high schoal children.

The structure of scientific collaboration networks

“…1-3). Foster et al (7), Fararo and Sunshine (8), and Moody and White (9), for instance, all conducted studies of friendship networks among middle-or high-school students, Bernard et al (10) did the same for communities of Utah Mormans, Native Americans, and Micronesian islanders, and there are many other examples to be found in the literature. Surveys or interviews were used to determine friendships.…”

Promoting Collaboration in Health Care Teams through Interprofessional Education: A Simulation Case Study

“…The t-test results depicting this significant difference are summarized in Table 4. Additionally, sociograms (Foster, Rapoport, and Orwant, 1963) constructed during the simulation clearly illustrated that a higher degree of collaboration was observed among members of IPE teams, as compared to members of Non-IPE teams -representing a greater potential for shared leadership. Figure 2 illustrates a sample sociogram produced during the simulation for an IPE team, where -on a particular day-every pair in the team, with the exception of the MD and RT, demonstrated collaborative behavior by establishing the illustrated links between one another.…”

“…The 100 teams in each group (constituting a total of 200 teams) were then asked to treat a patient over the course of a week. Sociograms -which are visual representations of networks, where nodes on the network depict individuals and line segments connecting the individuals depict the relationships that are being studied (Foster, Rapoport, & Orwant, 1963) -produced in Netlogo (Wilensky, 1999) were used to plot the collaborative interactions that took place amongst members of each team over the seven-day period (Mehra, Smith, Dixon, and Robertson, 2006). Figure 1 depicts how teams were structured in the simulation.…”

Reconstructing Granovetter's network theory

“…In a biased random net, the probability that two nodes get in contact is influenced by properties of the already evolved network. Specifically, leaning on the work of Foster et al (1963), Fararo posits the equation…”