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Notification
« November 28, 2005 | Main | December 5, 2005 »
1 December 2005
Control and causation
Following up on both the Mobius paper and my earlier passage on causation, how many social network related studies have incorporated a degree of control over some critical dimension of the network and/or other factors? In the Mobius paper resources, of a sort, were exogenously spread through the network, with certain paths facilitated (through lower interest rates for certain dyads) and their diffusion studied. In Festinger’s classic study on social influence, people were exogenously placed in housing. In Newcomb’s dorm study the students were exogenously placed in their rooms, and various measurements taken before they took residence. There are also small group lab experiments—Bavelas and colleagues’ work in the Small Group Network Laboratory at MIT in the 1950s—and social exchange theory—by Emerson and Cook and others in the 1970s and after. What other research has there been where there has been a degree of control? I interpret control pretty liberally here—e.g., where some exogenous proxy, correlated with communication, is used to examine the impact of the network. It’s an intrinsically difficult problem, since typically one cannot randomly assign certain types of relationships to pairs of people ("you two be friends"), but not insurmountable. If people have (1) ideas re particular research that did have a measure of control; or (2) ideas re how to achieve a degree of control so as to allow better causal inferences, please post a comment.
Posted by David Lazer at 10:08 AM