The goldfish package offers tools for applying statistical models to relational event data. The study of relational events is growing in social network research, driven by the increasing availability of data. For example, data collected from digital traces of individuals’ interactions —such as communication exchanges, transactions, and collaboration— provide in-depth details regarding the timing or sequence of relational actions between actors.
The workshop provides an introductory theoretical overview from a social science perspective, complemented by a hands-on tutorial (as time permits) on the different models implemented in the package:
* Dynamic Network Actor Models (DyNAM): Investigate relational event models as an actor-oriented decision process.
- rate: Actors compete to create the next relational event (Hollway, 2020).
- choice: The active actor chooses the receiver of the event from among the same (Stadtfeld and Block, 2017) or a different set of nodes (Haunss and Hollway, 2023).
- choice_coordination: The creation of coordination ties as a two-sided process (Stadtfeld, Hollway, and Block, 2017a), as in studies analyzing agreements between countries.
* Dynamic Network Actor Models for interactions (DyNAMi): Investigate dynamics of conversation groups and interpersonal interaction in different social contexts from an actor-oriented perspective (Hoffman et al., 2020), as in studies using social sensors.
- rate: Actors compete to join or leave groups.
- choice: The active actor chooses the group to join.
* Relational Event Models (REM): Investigate relational event models as a tie-oriented process (Butts, 2008), taking into account right-censoring (Stadtfeld, Hollway, and Block, 2017b).
Prerequisites:
Participants should be familiar with R and model-based statistical inference (such as logistic regression). Please bring a laptop with the R software environment, the goldfish package installed, and its dependencies.
More information about the package and installation is available at: https://github.com/stocnet/goldfish
References:
Butts, Carter. 2008. “A Relational Event Framework for Social Action. ”Sociological Methodology 38 (1): 155–200.
Haunss, Sebastian, and James Hollway. 2023. “Multimodal Mechanisms of Political Discourse Dynamics and the Case of Germany’s Nuclear Energy Phase-Out.” Network Science 11 (2): 205–23. https://doi.org/10.1017/nws.2022.31.
Hoffman, Marion, Per Block, Timon Elmer, and Christoph Stadtfeld. 2020. “A Model for the Dynamics of Face-to-Face Interactions in Social Groups.” Network Science 8 (S1): S4–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/nws.2020.3.
Hollway, James. 2020. “Network Embeddedness and the Rate of Water Cooperation and Conflict.” In Networks in Water Governance, edited by Manuel Fischer and Karin Ingold, 87–113. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46769-2_4.
Stadtfeld, Christoph, and Per Block. 2017. “Interactions, Actors, and Time: Dynamic Network Actor Models for Relational Events.” Sociological Science 4 (14): 318–52. https://doi.org/10.15195/v4.a14.
Stadtfeld, Christoph, James Hollway, and Per Block. 2017a. “Dynamic Network Actor Models: Investigating Coordination Ties Through Time.” Sociological Methodology 47 (1): 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0081175017709295.
———. 2017b. “Rejoinder: DyNAMs and the Grounds for Actor-oriented Network Event Models.” Sociological Methodology 47 (1): 56–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0081175017733457.
Length: 3 hours
Participants: 30
