ergm: faux.magnolia.high – R documentation

Become an expert in R — Interactive courses, Cheat Sheets, certificates and more!

faux.magnolia.high

Goodreau's Faux Magnolia High School as a network object

Description

This data set represents a simulation of an in-school friendship network. The network is named faux.magnolia.high because the school commnunities on which it is based are large and located in the southern US.

Usage

data(faux.magnolia.high)

Format

faux.magnolia.high is a network object with 1461 vertices (students, in this case) and 974 undirected edges (mutual friendships). To obtain additional summary information about it, type summary(faux.magnolia.high).

The vertex attributes are Grade, Sex, and Race. The Grade attribute has values 7 through 12, indicating each student's grade in school. The Race attribute is based on the answers to two questions, one on Hispanic identity and one on race, and takes six possible values: White (non-Hisp.), Black (non-Hisp.), Hispanic, Asian (non-Hisp.), Native American, and Other (non-Hisp.)

Licenses and Citation

If the source of the data set does not specified otherwise, this data set is protected by the Creative Commons License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/.

When publishing results obtained using this data set, the original authors (Resnick et al, 1997) should be cited. In addition this package should be cited as:

Mark S. Handcock, David R. Hunter, Carter T. Butts, Steven M. Goodreau, and Martina Morris. 2003 statnet: Software tools for the Statistical Modeling of Network Data
https://statnet.org.

Source

The data set is based upon a model fit to data from two school communities from the AddHealth Study, Wave I (Resnick et al., 1997). It was constructed as follows:

The two schools in question (a junior and senior high school in the same community) were combined into a single network dataset. Students who did not take the AddHealth survey or who were not listed on the schools' student rosters were eliminated, then an undirected link was established between any two individuals who both named each other as a friend. All missing race, grade, and sex values were replaced by a random draw with weights determined by the size of the attribute classes in the school.

The following ergm model was fit to the original data:

magnolia.fit <- ergm (magnolia ~ edges +
nodematch("Grade",diff=T) + nodematch("Race",diff=T) +
nodematch("Sex",diff=F) + absdiff("Grade") + gwesp(0.25,fixed=T),
burnin=10000, interval=1000, MCMCsamplesize=2500, maxit=25,
control=control.ergm(steplength=0.25))

Then the faux.magnolia.high dataset was created by simulating a single network from the above model fit:

faux.magnolia.high <- simulate (magnolia.fit, nsim=1,
burnin=100000000, constraint = "edges")

References

Resnick M.D., Bearman, P.S., Blum R.W. et al. (1997). Protecting adolescents from harm. Findings from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health, Journal of the American Medical Association, 278: 823-32.