R: Southern Women Data Set (Davis) as a bipartite "network"...
davis
R Documentation
Southern Women Data Set (Davis) as a bipartite “network” object
Description
This is a data set of 18 women observed over a nine-month period. During that
period, various subsets of these women had met in a series of 14 informal
social events. The data recored which women met for which events.
The data is originally from Davis, Gardner and Gardner (1941)
via UCINET and stored as a network object.
This documentation is taken from Freeman (2003) in his usual lucid
description. See the reference to the paper below:
In the 1930s, five ethnographers, Allison Davis, Elizabeth Stubbs
Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, Mary R. Gardner and J. G. St. Clair Drake,
collected data on stratification in Natchez, Mississippi (Warner, 1988, p.
93). They produced the book cited below [DGG] that reported a
comparative study of social class in black and in white society. One
element of this work involved examining the correspondence between
people's social class levels and their patterns of informal interaction. DGG
was concerned with the issue of how much the informal contacts made by
individuals were established solely (or primarily) with others at
approximately their own class levels. To address this question the authors
collected data on social events and examined people's patterns of informal
contacts.
In particular, they collected systematic data on the social activities of
18 women whom they observed over a nine-month period. During that
period, various subsets of these women had met in a series of 14 informal
social events. The participation of women in events was uncovered using
“interviews, the records of participant observers, guest lists, and the
newspapers” (DGG, p. 149). Homans (1950, p. 82), who presumably had
been in touch with the research team, reported that the data reflect joint
activities like, “a day's work behind the counter of a store, a meeting of a
women's club, a church supper, a card party, a supper party, a meeting of
the Parent-Teacher Association, etc.”
This data set has several interesting properties. It is small and
manageable. It embodies a relatively simple structural pattern, one in
which, according to DGG, the women seemed to organize themselves into
two more or less distinct groups. Moreover, they reported that the
positions - core and peripheral - of the members of these groups could also
be determined in terms of the ways in which different women had been
involved in group activities.
At the same time, the DGG data set is complicated enough that some
of the details of its patterning are less than obvious. As Homans (1950, p.
84) put it, “The pattern is frayed at the edges.” And, finally, this data set
comes to us in a two-mode “woman by event” form. Thus, it provides an
opportunity to explore methods designed for direct application to two-mode
data. But at the same time, it can easily be transformed into two one-mode
matrices (woman by woman or event by event) that can be examined using
tools for one-mode analysis.
Because of these properties, this DGG data set has become something
of a touchstone for comparing analytic methods in social network analysis.
Davis, Gardner and Gardner presented an intuitive interpretation of the data,
based in part on their ethnographic experience in the community. Then the
DGG data set was picked up by Homans (1950) who provided an
alternative intuitive interpretation. In 1972, Phillips and Conviser used an
analytic tool, based on information theory, that provided a systematic way to
reexamine the DGG data. Since then, this data set has been analyzed again
and again. It reappears whenever any network analyst wants to explore the
utility of some new tool for analyzing data.
When publishing results obtained using this data set the original authors
should be cited. In addition this package should be cited.
Source
Linton C. Freeman (2003).
Finding Social Groups: A Meta-Analysis of the
Southern Women Data, In Ronald Breiger, Kathleen Carley and Philippa Pattison,
eds. Dynamic Social Network Modeling and Analysis. Washington: The National
Academies Press.
References
Davis, A., Gardner, B. B. and M. R. Gardner
(1941) Deep South, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Linton C. Freeman (2003). Finding Social Groups: A Meta-Analysis of the
Southern Women Data, In Ronald Breiger, Kathleen Carley and Philippa Pattison,
eds. Dynamic Social Network Modeling and Analysis. Washington: The National
Academies Press.
See Also
statnet, network, ergm, ergm
Examples
data(davis)
# Fit a 2D 2-cluster fit and plot.
davis.fit<-ergmm(davis~euclidean(d=2,G=2)+rsociality)
plot(davis.fit,pie=TRUE,rand.eff="sociality")