{"id":317,"date":"2010-10-01T14:55:05","date_gmt":"2010-10-01T22:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/?p=317"},"modified":"2010-10-01T14:55:05","modified_gmt":"2010-10-01T22:55:05","slug":"homophily-and-peer-influence-are-messy-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/317_homophily-and-peer-influence-are-messy-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Homophily and peer influence are messy business"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some social scientists<\/a> have recently been getting themselves into trouble (and limelight) claiming that they have evidence of direct and indirect “contagion” (peer influence effects) in obesity, happiness, loneliness, etc. Statisticians and methodologists — and even science journalists<\/a> — have pointed out their troubles. In observational data, peer influence effects are confounded with those of homophily and common external causes<\/a>. That is, people are similar to other people in their social neighborhood because ties are more likely to form between similar people, and many external events that could cause the outcome are localized in networks (e.g., fast food restaurant opens down the street).<\/p>\n

Econometricians1<\/a><\/sup> have worked out the conditions necessary for peer influence effects to be identifiable.2<\/a><\/sup> Very few studies have plausibly satisfied these requirements. But even if an investigator meets these requirements, it is worth remembering that homophily and peer influence are still tricky to think about — let along produce credible quantitative estimates of.<\/p>\n

As Andrew Gelman notes<\/a>, homophily can depend on network structure and information cascades (a kind of peer influence effect) to enable the homophilous relationships to form. Likewise, the success or failure of influence in a relationship can affect that relationship. For example, once I convert you to my way of thinking — let’s say, about climate change, we’ll be better friends. To me, it seems like some of the downstream consequences of our similarity should be attributed to peer influence. If I get fat and so you do, it could be peer influence in many ways: maybe that’s because I convinced you that owning a propane grill is more environmentally friendly (and then we both ended up grilling a lot more red meat). Sounds like peer influence to me. But it’s not that me getting fat caused you to.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem here is looking only at peer influence effects in a single behavior or outcome at once. I look forward to the “clear thinking and adequate data” (Manski) that will allow us to better understand these processes in the future. Until then: scientists, please at least be modest in your claims and radical policy recommendations. This is messy business.<\/p>\n

  1. They do statistics but speak a different language than big “S” statisticians — kind of like machine learning folks. [\u21a9<\/a>]<\/li>
  2. For example, see Manski, C. F. (2000). Economic analysis of social interactions.<\/a> Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14<\/em>(3):115\u2013136. Economists call peer influence effects endogenous interactions and contextual interactions. [\u21a9<\/a>]<\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Some social scientists have recently been getting themselves into trouble (and limelight) claiming that they have evidence of direct and indirect “contagion” (peer influence effects) in obesity, happiness, loneliness, etc. Statisticians and methodologists — and even science journalists — have pointed out their troubles. In observational data, peer influence effects are confounded with those of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,34,74,13,82,41,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-causal-inference","category-health","category-influence","category-research-methods","category-social-networks","category-sociology","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}