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Psychometrika
12, 2023;88 (4): 1529-1555.

How Social Networks Influence Human Behavior: An Integrated Latent Space Approach for Differential Social Influence.

Jina Park, Ick Hoon Jin, Minjeong Jeon
Author Information
  1. Jina Park: Department of Applied Statistics, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
  2. Ick Hoon Jin: Department of Applied Statistics, Seoul, Republic of Korea. ijin@yonsei.ac.kr. ORCID
  3. Minjeong Jeon: School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
PMID: 37740883 DOI: 10.1007/s11336-023-09934-5

Abstract

How social networks influence human behavior has been an interesting topic in applied research. Existing methods often utilized scale-level behavioral data (e.g., total number of positive responses) to estimate the influence of a social network on human behavior. This study proposes a novel approach to studying social influence that utilizes item-level behavioral measures. Under the latent space modeling framework, we integrate the two latent spaces for respondents' social network data and item-level behavior measures into a single space we call 'interaction map'. The interaction map visualizes the association between the latent homophily among respondents and their item-level behaviors, revealing differential social influence effects across item-level behaviors. We also measure overall social influence by assessing the impact of the interaction map. We evaluate the properties of the proposed approach via extensive simulation studies and demonstrate the proposed approach with a real data in the context of studying how students' friendship network influences their participation in school activities.

Keywords

differential social influence item response model latent space item response model latent space model network analysis peer Network

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Grants

  1. 2022-22-0439/Yonsei University
  2. NRF2020R1A2C1A01009881 and RS-2023-00217705/National Research Foundation of Korea

MeSH Term

Humans
Psychometrics
Schools
Computer Simulation
Social Networking
Journal Article Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Article has an altmetric score of 1

Word Cloud

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