Lab PI Carter Butts and members Chris Marcum, Zack Almquist, Emma Spiro, Lorien Jasny, and Sean Fitzhugh will present their ongoing research at the 105th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
Carter Butts will be presenting at the Innovative Quantitative Methods session of the Section on Methodology. He will present a new approach to the analysis of populations of networks, using a Bayesian framework. Applicable to samples of families, groups, organizations, or other structures, this method allows the analyst to identify common structural tendencies and test hypotheses involving differences between populations of networks.
Chris Marcum will preside over the Social Ties and Aging roundtable. He uses a combination of the American Time Use data set and an empirical Bayes approach to test the hypothesis that the relationship between age and spending time with others is patterned by relationship type.
Zack Almquist will present “Cognitive Models of Group Identification: The Case of Regional Self-identification” in the Mathematical Sociology: New Developments in Mathematical Sociology section at ASA. Zack’s presentation will describe several cognitive model-based approaches to predicting regional identification in the US.
Emma Spiro will also present work at the New Developments in Mathematical Sociology; section. She will present her research on the effect of network dynamics on brokerage processes. Her work explores the behavior of traditional static measures of brokerage in dynamic environments and extends this work to provide a new measure of brokerage that incorporates changes in network structure.
Lorien Jasny will present at the section athematical Sociology at Key Intersections of the Discipline. She will build on her work from Sunbelt by using a dynamic approach to examine structure in propositional networks of political behavior. She will also formulate appropriate baseline models for this data.
Sean Fitzhugh will also present at the Key Intersections of the Discipline section. His work examines radio communication networks of organizational units responding to the World Trade Center disaster of 2001 and their differing robustness patterns. He finds that among organizations with day-to-day involvement with disaster response, organizational roles are key to predicting actors’ importance in preserving network connectivity. These roles lose their predictive value among organizations without such involvement with disaster response.