sampson {VBLPCM}

Cumulative network of positive affection within a monastery as a “network” object

Description

Sampson (1969) recorded the social interactions among a group of monks while resident as an experimenter on vision, and collected numerous sociometric rankings. During his stay, a political “crisis in the cloister” resulted in the expulsion of four monks (Nos. 2, 3, 17, and 18) and the voluntary departure of several others - most immediately, Nos. 1, 7, 14, 15, and 16. (In the end, only 5, 6, 9, and 11 remained). Of particular interest is the data on positive affect relations (“liking”), in which each monk was asked if they had positive relations to each of the other monks.

The data were gathered at three times to capture changes in group sentiment over time. They were represent three time points in the period during which a new cohort entered the monastery near the end of the study but before the major conflict began.

Each member ranked only his top three choices on “liking”. (Some subjects offered tied ranks for their top four choices). A tie from monk A to monk B exists if A nominated B as one of his three best friends at that that time point.

samplike is the time-aggregated network. It is the cumulative tie for “liking” over the three periods. For this, a tie from monk A to monk B exists if A nominated B as one of his three best friends at any of the three time points.

This data is standard in the social network analysis literature, having been modeled by Holland and Leinhardt (1981), Reitz (1982), Holland, Laskey and Leinhardt (1983), and Fienberg, Meyer, and Wasserman (1981), Hoff, Raftery, and Handcock (2002), etc. This is only a small piece of the data collected by Sampson.

Usage

 data(sampson)

Source

Sampson, S.~F. (1968), A novitiate in a period of change: An experimental and case study of relationships, Unpublished ph.d. dissertation, Department of Sociology, Cornell University.

References

White, H.C., Boorman, S.A. and Breiger, R.L. (1976). Social structure from multiple networks. I. Blockmodels of roles and positions. American Journal of Sociology, 81(4), 730-780.

See Also

network, plot.network, ergmm

Examples

data(sampson)
plot(samplike)