Coleman's High School Friendship Data
James Coleman (1964) reports research on self-reported friendship ties among 73 boys in a small high school in Illinois over the 1957-1958 academic year. Networks of reported ties for all 73 informants are provided for two time points (fall and spring).
data(coleman)
An adjacency array containing two directed, unvalued 73-node networks:
| [1,,] | Fall | binary matrix | Friendship for Fall, 1957 |
| [2,,] | Spring | binary matrix | Friendship for Spring, 1958 |
Both networks reflect answers to the question, “What fellows here in school do you go around with most often?” with the presence of an (i,j,k) edge indicating that j nominated k in time period i. The data are unvalued and directed; although the self-reported ties are highly reciprocal, unreciprocated nominations are possible.
It should be noted that, although this data is usually described as “friendship,” the sociometric item employed might be more accurately characterized as eliciting “frequent elective interaction.” This should be borne in mind when interpreting this data.
Coleman, J. S. (1964). Introduction to Mathermatical Sociology. New York: Free Press.
data(coleman) #Plot showing edges by time point gplot(coleman[1,,]|coleman[2,,],edge.col=2*coleman[1,,]+3*coleman[2,,])
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