social network

Methods for Inference from Respondent-Driven Sampling Data

Respondent-driven sampling is a commonly used method for sampling from hard-to-reach human populations connected by an underlying social network of relations. Beginning with a convenience sample, participants pass coupons to invite their contacts to …

Evaluating Variance Estimators for Respondent‐Driven Sampling

Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) is a network-based method for sampling hard-to-reach populations that is widely used by public health agencies and researchers worldwide. Estimation of population characteristics from RDS data is challenging due to …

Removing Phase Transitions from Gibbs Measures

Gibbs measures are a fundamental class of distributions for the analysis of high dimensional data. Phase transitions, which are also known as degeneracy in the network science literature, are an emergent property of these models that well describe …

Estimating Within-School Contact Networks To Understand Influenza Transmission

Many epidemic models approximate social contact behavior by assuming random mixing within mixing groups (e.g., homes, schools and workplaces). The effect of more realistic social network structure on estimates of epidemic parameters is an open area …

On the Concept of Snowball Sampling

A phenomenon in the sociology of science is that multidisciplinary fields tend to produce a plethora of inconsistent terminology. Often the meaning of a term evolves over time, or different terms are used for the same concept. More confusing is the …

Adjusting for network size and composition effects in exponential-family random graph models

Exponential-family random graph models (ERGMs) provide a principled way to model and simulate features common in human social networks, such as propensities for homophily and friend-of-a-friend triad closure. We show that, without adjustment, ERGMs …

A Description of Within-family Resource Exchange Networks in a Malawian Village

In this paper we explore patterns of economic transfers between adults within household and family networks in a village in Malawi’s Rumphi district, using data from the 2006 round of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health. We fit …