Smoking Behavior and Friendship Formation: The Importance of Time Heterogeneity in Studying Social Network Dynamics

Abstract

This study illustrates the importance of assessing and accounting for time heterogeneity in longitudinal social network analysis. We apply the time heterogeneity model selection procedure of [1] to a dataset collected on social tie formation for university freshman in the Netherlands by [2]. Within the context of analyzing selection effects for smoking homophily to understand the implications of tobacco policy at a university we show that failing to account for time heterogeneity yields quite different results substantively from the model arrived at using [1]. While the results are limited by the small scope of the dataset, the paper motivates the testing of time heterogeneity within longitudinal studies of social network behavior and further study of tobacco policy within university settings.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA535893

Entities

People

  • Danielle J. Satchell
  • Joshua A. Lospinoso

Organizations

  • United States Military Academy

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Dynamics
  • Friendship
  • Markov Processes
  • Method Of Moments
  • Network Science
  • Probability
  • Random Variables
  • Schools
  • Social Networks
  • Statistical Analysis
  • Statistics
  • Stochastic Processes
  • Students
  • Surveys
  • United States
  • United States Military Academy
  • Universities

Readers

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