SOC3412 Social Networking assignment

SOC3412 Social Networking assignment essay assignment

SOC3412 Social Networking assignment essay assignment

The purpose of this exercise is to learn how to use UCINET to identify cliques and conduct a structural equivalence blockmodel. Monastery network: In 1968, Samuel Sampson wrote a doctoral dissertation about 18 men living in a New England monastery who were training to become monks. The network data for this assignment come from the fourth time that Sampson asked the men to choose three others whom they liked most.

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(Two men decided to name four others; even monks don’t always follow instructions!) Sampson identified four factions, that is, subgroups of novice monks: (1) The Loyal Opposition, a group of five conservatives who had entered the monastery earlier; (2) the Young Turks, a group of seven who entered later and questioned many monastery practices, which the Loyal Opposition defended; (3) three Interstitials, who wavered between the two sides of the conflict; and (4) three Outcasts, who were not accepted by anyone else. The names of the men and the factions to which they belong are listed on the next page. Near the end of Sampson’s research, a “crisis in the cloister” erupted, resulting in the expulsion of four monks (Ambrose, Bonaven, Elias, Simp), because they were “not in conformity with the spirit of the order.” Five others almost immediately left voluntarily (Albert, Amand, Basil, Romul, Victor). In the end, only Hugh, John, Louis, and Peter remained at the monastery. Could a graph of the liking network, also using the monks’ betweenness centralities, a clique analysis, and a block model give insights into those occurrences? Datasets: Monastery_Like4 is an undirected UCINET data file that was symmetrized using the maximum criterion (i.e., if one monk named a second monk, they are assumed to like one another). Monastery Attr is a UCINET attribute file with each monk classified into one of the four factions identified by Sampson: (1) Loyal Opposition; (2) Young Turks; (3) Interstitials; (4) Outcasts; and their normalized betweenness centrality scores. The table on the next page displays the contents of the attribute file.

Write a brief report (print color graphs and tables, with single-spaced text) describing the main findings of your analyses; include the following: 1. Display the color graph of the monastery liking network in which you modified the nodes

to indicate the novice monks’ attributes. Describe what you observe. In particular, comment on the locations of members of the Loyal Opposition, the Young Turks, and others in the graph, the connections within and between faction members, and any other noteworthy features such as the actors’ betweenness centralities. To what extent does this graph reveal the opposing political factions identified by Sampson?

2. Display the list of cliques found, the Actor-by-Actor Clique Co-membership Matrix, the

Hierarchical Clustering of Overlap Matrix, and the color graph of the Clique Overlap network. (You may cut-and-past from UCINET output, but use Courier font to keep columns aligned!) Describe the major findings of this analysis, commenting on whether your subgroup analysis identifies the monastery’s opposing political factions as described by Sampson. (Suggestion: Color-code the members’ names in the list of cliques, using the same four colors you use in the graph.)

3. From the block model analysis, display the 4-block matrix and the density matrix. Using the mean network density, manually create the image matrix for the network, where 1 means block density is ≥ network mean and 0 means block density network mean. Describe the block model’s major features, such as the within- and between-block ties and whether the monks’ block memberships are consistent with Sampson’s factions.

4. How well or poorly do the network color graph, clique analysis, and block model analysis together help to explain and understand the expulsions and departures of the novice monks during the “crisis in the cloister?”