Filling in the Blanks: A Theory of Cognitive Categories and the Structure of Social Affiliation Lint

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Filling in the Blanks A Theory of Cognitive
Categories and the Structure of Social
AffiliationLinton C. Freeman

• Ahmet Guler
• October 9, 2006

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What is the topic?

• Human Social Affiliation
• Affiliation means strong ties which refer to more
  or less stable interpersonal relationships that
  involve both frequent interaction and positive
  sentiment (p.118)
• How people perceive and recall their own
  affiliations and those of the others around them?
  

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How can we measure affiliation?

• Basic components of affiliation
• Sentiment Asking people to measure sentiment
• Interaction The correspondence between reported
  affiliation and interaction. Problem socially
  constrained relations ( For ex job relations)
• Researchers rely on peoples report about who is
  affiliated with whom but people are good at
  recalling others interaction but bad at
  recalling their interaction.

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How people recall others interaction?

• People use cognitive categorization to perceive
  and recall social affiliation.
• People categorize objects and events according to
  their characteristics such as age, occupation,
  and ethnic background
• Also, the mental structure of a human being has
  the form of taxonomy. This taxonomy provides to
  classify group categories at different levels
  (group within groups)

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The structure of affiliation

• People apparently think about affiliation in
  categorical and hierarchical terms
• In order to be categorical in interaction there
  has to be no intransitive triples
• This means there could be no case where an
  individual a interacted with another individual b
  and b interacted with c, but where a and c did
  not interact.

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The structure of affiliation cont

• Similarly, in order to be hierarchical,
  interaction would have to exhibit no intransitive
  triple at any level of interaction.
• This means there could be no triple in which a
  and b interacted a given amount, b and c
  interacted the same amount, and a and c
  interacted less than that amount (p.121).

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Are these applicable into everyday interaction?

• According to seven data sets, large numbers of
  intransitive triples are apparent at almost every
  level of interaction.
• Therefore, how people categorize themselves and
  other individuals into groups despite the fact
  that interaction patterns do not allow them to do
  so.

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How do people cope with messy data?

• People simplify the realities in their
  environment.
• People exaggerate the real world regularities to
  part them into groups.
• People avoid intransitivity in interaction.

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Construction Process of Cognitive Groups

• Members of the community cluster groups using
  top-down approach. They categorize individuals
  thorough more visible interaction to fewer
  visible interaction.
• When people confront an intransitive triple, they
  assume that they missed the interaction which is
  normally did not occur.

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Conclusion

• People use the mechanism illustrated above to
  clean up messy data on interaction and they fill
  in the blanks to categorize the data that
  normally cannot be grouped.

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The Boundary Specification Problem in Network
AnalysisEdward O. Laumann, Peter V. Marsden, and
David Prensky
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What is the topic?

• The problem of specifying system boundaries in
  the design of network studies.
• The inclusion rule, which determines the boundary
  of the social network study, has been overlooked
  by researchers.

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Two Major Approaches

• Realist and Nominalist Approaches
• Realist Approach presumes that actors define the
  boundaries of social entities therefore, the
  network can be treated as a social fact .
• Nominalist Approach states that the observer
  defines the boundary of the network and he/she
  uses his/her own conceptual framework on social
  reality.

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Three components

• There are three components for defining the
  boundary of the network actors, relations, or
  activities
• The most common approach is based on the
  characteristic of actors. Also, there are two
  common approaches when taking an actor as a focus
  of the study
• The Positional Approach
• the Reputational Approach.

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Difference between Two Approaches

• While the positional approach takes into
  consideration the position of the actor in a
  formally constructed group, the reputational
  approach gives importance to the judgments of
  informants in determining participant.

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Relational Approach

• In this approach, the study starts with small
  groups of actors and the boundary of the study
  expands until the criterion of termination is
  satisfied.
• Also known as a snowball sampling.
• This method is rarely used by researchers

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Participation of Actors in Events

• The third approach looks at the participation of
  actors in some events for analyzing the
  relationship among these actors.
• The boundary of the network is predetermined by
  the observer by looking at the participation in
  the event.

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A typology of Boundary Specification Strategies
for delimiting actors within a network

• Eight boundary specification approaches by
  crosstabulating by crosstabulating
  metatheoratical perspective and definitional
  focuses for delimiting the boundary of the
  network

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Eight Boundary Specification Approaches

• Realist-Attributes of Nodes Actors are defined
  by realistic tactic which treats actors as nodes
  in a network. Examples Corporate Group (Weber,
  1947), Bank Wiring Room (Roethlisberger and
  Dickson, 1939), school classroom (Davis, 1970)
  and others
• Nominalist- Attributes of Nodes Contrary to
  category (I), actors are defined by their
  attributes in the network. Examples doctors in
  small cities (Coleman, Katz and Metzel, 1966),
  American Business Elite ( Useem, 1979), Study of
  Organizations in a small city (Galaskieiwcz,
  1979)

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Eight Boundary Specification Approaches

• Realist-Relation The boundary of the study is
  defined by the relational nexus of actors in a
  network. Example Primary Group Clique (Cooley,
  1909)
• Nominalist-Relation The boundary of a network is
  defined arbitrarily by the observer. The starting
  point of study is defined arbitrarily and the
  relations of actors analyzed at the satisfactory
  level which defined by the observer. Example
  Small World Problem (Travers and Milgram, 1969)

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Eight Boundary Specification Approaches

• Realist-Participation in Event or Activity The
  inclusion rule for this approach is participation
  of actors in one or more events, or activities.
  Example Participants in a community controversy
  (Dahl, 1961), Participants in common social
  events ( Homans, 1950), Street Corner Society (
  Whyte, 1955)
• Nominalist-Participation in Event or Activity
  This approach does not use realist tactic to
  delimitate the boundary of the network. Actors
  are defined according to their inclination, and
  interest. Examples Invisible College (Crane,
  1972, Burt 1978)

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Eight Boundary Specification Approaches

• Realist- Multiple Foci This approach uses more
  than one analytic feature of the network to
  define the boundary of the study from the realist
  perspective. Examples Klasse fur sich (Marx),
  Ethnic Community (Barth, 1975)
• Nominalist- Multiple Foci This approach uses
  more than one analytic features of the network to
  define the boundary of the study from the
  nominalist perspective Example National Elite
  Circles (Moore, 1979)

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The Inclusion Rule for Relations

• Despite the explicit selection strategies for
  actors, the inclusion rules for relationships
  havent been developed by the researchers.
• The main issue in analyzing relationship is
  using particular relations as generators of a
  social structure. With neglecting the data that
  are not available causes the partial system
  fallacy.

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The Inclusion Rule for Participation of Actors in
Events

• The problem of setting limits on the inclusion of
  events, activities, or interests in network
  studies is the arbitrariness of the observer.
• There has to be a developed strategy for sampling
  or selecting focal events in the network for the
  boundary specification of the activities.

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Conclusion

• The problem of boundary specification has
  ignored by the researchers during the past
  decade, and more attention to this problem will
  help to the success of network methods.

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The Problem of Informant Accuracy The Validity
of Retrospective DataH.Russell Bernard, Peter
Killworth, David Kronenfeld, and Lee Sailer
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What is the topic?

• The problem of informant accuracy in reporting
  past events, behavior, and circumstances.
• Literature Review to alleviate problem

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The Literature on Informant Accuracy

• 1. Recall of child care behavior
• 2. Recall of health seeking behavior
• 3. Recall of communication and social
  interactions

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Results of studies

• All of the studies about informant accuracy state
  that on average, about half of what informants
  report is probably incorrect in some way.
• The prevalence of informant inaccuracy threatens
  the validity of the studies.

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Why do people recall inaccurately?

• Memory Effects
• Omissions
• Telescoping
• Omissions happen due to the fact that memory
  decays in time.
• Telescoping occurs because events in the past are
  likely to be recalled as being more recent than
  they actually are.

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Why do people recall inaccurately?

• In addition, the memory of informants is subject
  to systematic distortion because of cultural
  norms.

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What can be done?

• There are various interviewing techniques to
  increase the accuracy. For example data
  collection techniques such as aided recall,
  record assisted recall, and bounded recall
  increases the accuracy by an average of about
  10.

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What can be done?

• When informants are asked about the events or
  things that not happened or existed they tend to
  provide information according to their
  presuppositions. Therefore, in order to increase
  the accuracy of information, the interviewer has
  to show more resistance to badgering.

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What can be done?

• The groups are better than individuals for
  recalling the details of information.
• While individuals are not good at recalling whom
  they communicated with, it is stated that groups
  know who most popular persons (communicated-with)
  in the network are.

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What can be done?

• According to the theory of individual differences
  in information accuracy, there are relatively
  accurate informants and relatively inaccurate
  informants.

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Appendix C Centralization or Democratization
Assessing the Internets Impact on Policy
Networks A Theoretical and Empirical InquiryR.
Karl Rethemeyer
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The Focus of the Survey

• The effect of the Internet on the actors of state
  mental healthy policy
• the impact of the Internet on the policy
  participation process, communication and
  relationship among actors in the policy network.

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The Structure of the Survey

• The survey consists of seven parts
• Part I General Information,
• Part II Communication,
• Part III Relationships,
• Part IV Influence and Communication,
• Part V Mobilization Efforts,
• Part VI Computers and Internet,
• Part VII Information about Participant

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Part I General Information

• Questions about the organization of the
  interviewee, and its activities in the mental
  health policy.
• There are seven different actors (organizations)
  in the survey related to the state mental health
  policy.

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Part II Communication

• Questions about the different communication types
  such as Routine, Non-Electronic Communications,
  Routine, Internet Communications, Confidential,
  Non-Electronic Communications, Confidential,
  Internet Communications, Policy Information
  Collections, Non-Electronic, and Policy
  Information Collections, Internet

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Part III Relationships

• Questions about formal or informal relationship
  among policy actors, the funding and regulatory
  relationships, ownership, control, membership and
  shared resources among policy actors in mental
  health policy.

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Part IV Influence and Communication

• Questions about how much influence has any actor
  on the state mental health policy. Whose more
  influential as a policy actor in a six-year
  period (the last three years, now, and the next
  three years)?

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Part V Mobilization Efforts

• Questions about the mobilization efforts of the
  organization to encourage participation in policy
  shaping process and questions about the rate of
  internet usage for mobilization efforts.

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Part VI Computers and Internet

• How the organization uses the computer and the
  Internet. Also, questions about the beliefs and
  attitudes of policy actors and workers
• in organizations about internet communication.

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Part VII Information about Participant

• Questions about the interviewees role in the
  organization.