Weekly sociometric preference rankings among 17 men attending the University of Michigan in the autumn of 1956. The men were recruited to live in off-campus fraternity housing rented for them as part of the Michigan Group Study Project, supervised by Theodore Newcomb from 1953 to 1956. All were incoming transfer students with no prior acquaintance of one another, which makes this one of the earliest records of a social structure forming from scratch.

Each week, every man ranked all 16 others from most to least preferred. No ties in rank were allowed; each wave is a complete directed network. Two tie attributes record this:

  • rank: the raw ranking given, where 1 is the respondent's first preference and 16 their last

  • weight: the ranking reversed (17 - rank), so that larger values indicate stronger preference, as expected by weighted measures

data(ison_fraternity)

Format

#> -- # Newcomb's Fraternity ------------------------------------------------------
#> # A longitudinal, labelled, weighted, directed network of 17 mens and 4080
#> preference arcs over 15 waves
#>
#> -- Nodes
#> # A tibble: 17 x 1
#>   label
#>   <chr>
#> 1 A01
#> 2 A02
#> 3 A03
#> 4 A04
#> 5 A05
#> 6 A06
#> # i 11 more rows
#>
#> -- Ties
#> # A tibble: 4,080 x 5
#>    from    to weight  rank  time
#>   <int> <int>  <dbl> <dbl> <int>
#> 1     2     1      9     8     1
#> 2     3     1      4    13     1
#> 3     4     1      4    13     1
#> 4     5     1      3    14     1
#> 5     6     1     10     7     1
#> 6     7     1      2    15     1
#> # i 4,074 more rows
#>

Details

The men are anonymised as A01 to A17. Waves are numbered by the week of observation. Data were collected in weeks 1 to 9 and 11 to 16; no data were collected in week 10. The network therefore has 15 waves but a maximum wave number of 16.

References

Newcomb, Theodore M. 1961. The Acquaintance Process. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. doi:10.1037/13156-000

Nordlie, Peter. 1958. A longitudinal study of interpersonal attraction in a natural group setting. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan.

White, Harrison C., Scott A. Boorman, and Ronald L. Breiger. 1976. "Social Structure from Multiple Networks. I. Blockmodels of Roles and Positions". American Journal of Sociology 81(4): 730-780. doi:10.1086/226141