The Future of Social Network Studies
Dr. Pentland of MIT and his team are on the forefront of an emerging field of research dubbed by Dr. Pentland as “social physics.” They study network structures and how those structures affect individuals and aggregate outcomes. A key part of the remarkable work that Pentland and his team does is to create new behavioral measures for observing social networks that can simultaneously be qualitative and quantitative.
In “Social fMRI: Investigating and shaping social mechanisms in the real world”, Dr. Pentland takes advantage of one the most pervasive items in our lives, our cell phones. His team developed a “mobile-phone-centric social and behavioral sensing system.” Essentially, they enable the subjects’ cell phones to constantly collect data by recording the user’s activity and other functions of the phone such as location and accelerometry. This vast amount of data collected from a single person can yield meaningful results for that individual; however, the most spectacular dimension of the research is that this type of data collection is conducted on an entire community for a year, allowing for an incredibly in-depth view into the social workings of that community.
Dr. Pentland’s work mainly focuses on the spread of ideas and information, but this type of research method could ripple throughout all of the social sciences, causing a great leap forward in fields like psychology, sociology and economics.
An example of how this sort of research method could be extremely useful in sociology is in analyzing the underlying power structures of social networks. Past research has looked into the power within small groups of people like in the classic study “An Information Flow Model for Conflict and Fission in Small Groups”, in which the social dynamic and eventual fissure of a campus karate club were analyzed. But now studies can be expanded outward to analyze the relationships between of thousands of individuals to expose power structures within society as a whole. With access to so many different varieties of data within the same set, multiple measures of power, affluence, location, embeddedness, or information to name a few, could be used either individually or simultaneously to study a population.
The new technology and methodology that Dr. Pentland employs signifies a digital revolution for the social sciences. Studies in the past had to choose between and in-depth study of a small number of subjects or a broad, surface-level study of a large number of subjects. Big Data Mining offers the bridge between these opposing ends of the spectrum.
Links:
“Social fMRI: Investigating and shaping social mechanisms in the real world”
Studieshttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574119211001246
“An Information Flow Model for Conflict and Fission in Small Groups”
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3629752?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents