Peter J. Carrington

Models and methods in social network analysis

REPRESENTAÇÕES SOCIAIS NA ÁREA DE GESTÃO EM SAÚDE: Teoria e Prática. De Neusa Rolita Cavedon (Org.). 1a Ed. Porto Alegre: Dacasa, 2005. 109 p. ISBN: 85-86072-66-4. O estudo das representações sociais tem ganhado ênfase por parte de pesquisadores brasileiros que buscam um arcabouço teórico sólido e consistente para a investigação qualitativa de fenômenos organizacionais de forma contextualizada, descritiva e reveladora de significados subjetivos. Significados estes que muitas vezes não podem ser captados e/ou explicados pelas abordagens científicas tradicionais. Um exemplo dessa ênfase é a recente obra da professora e pesquisadora Neusa Rolita Cavedon e seus colaboradores (Nota por Thiago Duarte Pimentel CEPEAD/UFMG).

The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis has been one of the fastest growing and most influential areas of recent times. This sparkling Handbook offers an unrivalled resource. Systematically, it introduces readers to the key concepts, substantive topics, central methods, and prime debates. The result is a peerless resource for teachers and students. Instead of consulting a variety of books and journal articles, the Handbook offers a one-stop guide that will be used by readers for decades to come.

Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis: Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences

Personal relationships have long been of central interest to social scientists, but the subject of friendship has been relatively neglected. Moreover, most studies of friendship have been social psychological in focus. Placing Friendship in Context is a unique collection bridging social psychological and social structural research to advance understanding of this important subject. In it, some of the world’s leading researchers explore the social and historical contexts in which friendships and similar informal ties develop and how it is that these contexts shape the form and substance the relationships assume. Together, they demonstrate that friendship cannot be understood from individualist or dyadic perspectives alone, but is a relationship significantly influenced by the environment in which it is generated. By analysing the ways in which friendships articulate with the social structures in which they are embedded, Placing Friendship in Context redescribes such personal relationships at both the macro and the micro level.

Gender, gun control, suicide and homicide in Canada

Abstract An article recently published in the Archives of Suicide Research (Leenaars & Lester, 1996, 2, 223-234) concerning the impact of the 1977 Canadian gun control legislation on the national gender-specific rates of suicide and homicide concluded that “… the bill had a preventative effect only on female suicide and homicide without displacement. There may have been compensatory use in other methods for males in both types of lethal violence” (Abstract). The article states that “the passage of C-51 seems to have a more beneficial impact on female victims than on male victims… Males appear to be less influenced by gun restrictions… Displacement, especially in males in suicide - and homicide - may impede efforts to prevent violence” (1996: 229-232).1 Based on a re-analysis of the data which they present, we must disagree with these statements.

A goodness-of-fit index for blockmodels

Abstract The ‘fit’ between blockmodels and data networks is extended from a binary to a continuous concept. An index of goodness-of-fit for α-fit blockmodels is proposed, based on the purity (density of 1s or 0s) of the submatrices of the data matrix(es) after the blockmodel partition is imposed. The characteristics of this index are compared with those of correlation coefficient. Some applications are described.

Estimation of Offending and Co-offending Using Available Data with Model Support

Police data under-report the numbers of crimes and of offenders, the numbers of offenders participating in individual criminal incidents (incident sizes) and the numbers of incidents in which individual offenders participate (offender activity). Criminal participation in incidents is a concept that underlies and unifies all of these phenomena, so that the numbers of incidents and of offenders, and incident size distributions and offender activity distributions, can all be derived from the criminal participation matrix. Two related probability models are presented that permit the estimation of numbers of incidents and offenders, incident size distributions, offender activity distributions, and co-offending distributions, from police-reported crime data, and data on the reporting of crime to police. The models are estimated, using data from the Canadian Uniform Crime Reporting Survey and national victimization surveys for the period 1995–2001.

The determination of enterprise groupings through combined ownership and directorship ties

Abstract Recent work on economic structure has tended to focus around discovering general or global mappings to represent complex patterns of binary or multiplex ties. By contrast, this paper seeks to define an intermediate level of structure—the “enterprise ”—and to measure it concretely using a combination of ownership and director/officership or executive board membership ties. In the first section, we outline the theoretical and substantive basis of the concept of “enterprises” as it is used in the literature. Difficulties in the operationalization of this concept are then surveyed and some tentative solutions suggested. In the second section, we describe in detail the methods used to implement our definition of enterprises for a set which includes the 5306 firms which most directly shape the Canadian economy. The third section outlines the impact of the use of four slightly different versions of this definition on arrays of enterprise memberships. Finally, the larger implications of our findings—both for the measurement of intermediate levels of structure and for the study of cross-national economic connections—are discussed.

Structuring Police Discretion The Effect on Referrals to Youth Court

This article examines the impact of the Youth Criminal Justice Act of 2002 on police discretion with apprehended young offenders in Canada. Data for 1986 to 2005 from the Canadian Uniform Crime Reporting Survey are analyzed using an interrupted time series design. The Youth Criminal Justice Act was successful in achieving its objective of reducing youth court referrals by structuring police discretion. It caused a substantial change in the exercise of police discretion with apprehended youth: a substantial decrease in the use of charges and a corresponding increase in the use of alternatives to charging. The substitution of extrajudicial measures for charges occurred in all four regions of Canada and was much greater with minor offenses than with serious youth crime. Possible reasons for the success of the Youth Criminal Justice Act are discussed.

The Effect of Prior Youth Court Dispositions on Current Disposition: An Application of Societal-Reaction Theory

This paper tests hypotheses implicit in the societal-reaction perspective concerning the nature and pattern of the relationship between prior and current youth court dispositions. The dispositional stage is the most critical decision-making level which young offenders encounter in their contact with the youth court system. Previous research has produced inconsistent results in the attempt to determine which model or models of justice underlie dispositional decisions by youth court judges. Log-linear modeling is employed on 16,636 youth court cases in Canada in 1993/1994 to determine the nature and magnitude of the relationship between current and prior dispositions. The results indicate that prior youth court dispositions exert a significant impact on current dispositions, even when relevant variables are controlled. Evidence is found mainly of stabilization—the repetition of the same type of disposition—and also of escalation in dispositions. These findings provide support for the societal-reaction theory and possibly for the desert-based theory of sentencing.

COBLOC: A hierarchical method for blocking network data

A method is described for finding blockmodels of a given network using an agglomerative hierarchical clustering technique with optional backtrack capabilities. The clustering criterion is an index of the goodness of fit of the blockmodel that would be produced by a given clustering. This index is computed for each clustering considered. This method is compared on a priori grounds with other methods and comparative results are reported for its application to the Western Electric Bank Wiring Room data. Extensions combining this method with other clustering methods are discussed.