Influence versus Selection: The Coevolution of Dynamic Networks and Adolescent Attitude and Behavior Dimensions

• In Event: 361 - Section on Methodology Paper Session. Open Topic I

Abstract

The issue of whether behavioral similarity between friends is due to peer influence, friendship selection, or both has been raised and discussed abundantly in the literature. These two opposite theoretical perspectives have their own advocates respectively to justify the casual relationship between individual action and social network structure while some studies leave this question open and apply quantitative methods on empirical data to examine either selection or influence causes similarity among group members. We notice two issues at least have been gotten less attention in the literature and should not be omitted. One is behavior side: only dealing with monotonic dimension of conceptualizing adolescent behavior. The other issue is network structure side: features of friendship network structure are treated as independent variables in the model to examine the relationship between individual behavior and social network. We stir up our research interest in network-behavior coevolution through discussing these two issues above. We used a longitudinal data to observe the changes of adolescents’ friendship and their behavior in a number of networks. To model and analyze our data, we used multidimensional scaling model with dynamics of friendship network to obtain adolescent network similarity/dissimilarity and observe multidimensional behaviors for the joint analysis of selection-influence effects on behavioral similarity between peers.

Authors

• Chyi-In Wu, Academia Sinica

• Hwai-Chung Ho, Academia Sinica

• Chih-Yao Chang, Academia Sinica