October 13, 2015 | News | Suessmilch Lecture

Studying social influence in networks using the stochastic actor-oriented model

On October 21, mathematician Tom Snijders will give a lecture at the MPIDR. He will explain how to study peer influence in networks using the stochastic actor-oriented model.

About the talk
Assessing peer influence is difficult because of what Manski (1993) called the “reflection problem”: it is difficult to decide whether peers are alike because they selected each other based on similarity of attributes and behaviour (social selection), or because they influenced each other (social influence). Examples where such questions occur are studies of adolescent development, with behaviours such as smoking, drinking, and school attitudes. As a first step, the researcher must decide whom to consider as peers. A social network approach suggests that those may be considered as peers who regard each other as subjectively relevant interaction partners, and to study entire peer networks in groups with a natural network boundary such as school cohorts. Panel data of the relational network and relevant behavioural variables in such groups can be helpful to obtain evidence for social selection and for social influence in such groups. To analyze and model such data, a major challenge is to find good representations of the dependence structures that characterize social network data.

About the presenter
Tom Snijders is professor of Statistics and Methodology in the Social Sciences at the University of Groningen and emeritus fellow of Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Previously he was professor of Statistics in the Social Sciences at the University of Oxford and professor in Mathematical Sociology at the University of Utrecht. He is interested generally in statistical and mathematical methods in the social sciences, in particular network analysis and multilevel analysis.

Time and Venue
Wednesday, October 21, 2015, 9.30 a.m. in the Institute´s Auditorium