Dartmouth Events

The Dartmouth Interdisciplinary Network Research Group (DINR) is delighted to host James O'Malley on Friday October 23. James is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science here at Dartmouth and will be running a special workshop on methods of social network analysis.

Description:  Social network analysis (SNA) is an emerging area of research involving multiple disciplines and a breadth of problems that tends to not be appreciated. This workshop style seminar will describe several types of studies involving social networks with examples drawn primarily from medicine. The methods used for analyzing each study-type will be described along with the challenges confronting the ability to draw reliable statistical inferences. Because many questions involving social organization may be depicted by networks of relationships, SNA has tremendous potential to advance research and practice in these fields. Whilst social network studies have been pursued for some time in social science disciplines, where numerous descriptive methods for analyzing them have been proposed, interest among statistician and other quantitative researchers has only recently blossomed. The workshop will consist of three main parts: (i) Introduction to the forms of network data, basic network statistics, and common descriptive measures; (ii) “Regular statistical analyses” applied to studies involving a sample of networks; (iii) Relational models in which the network itself is a multivariate dependent variable; (iv) Models or analyses in which networks are fundamental to the construction of explanatory variables, including estimation methods that seek to distinguish social influence (e.g., peer effects) from other social phenomena such as homophily. The workshop, which was recently presented at the International Conference on Health Policy Statistics, will proceed at a pace that reflects the audience’s interest in each topic as opposed to rushing to cover all topics in detail.

For details of other forthcoming events, please click here.