James Moody

Duke University | DU · Department of Sociology

Community mixing patterns by sociodemographic traits can inform the risk of epidemic spread among groups, and the balance of in- and out-group mixing affects epidemic potential. Understanding mixing patterns can provide insight about potential transmission pathways throughout a community. We used a snowball sampling design to enroll people recently...

This volume presents an overview and summary of findings from the PROSPER (Promoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience) Peers project, which for over a decade has sought to illuminate how adolescent friendship networks channel and facilitate the spread of developmental outcomes such as substance use, other risky behavio...

This volume presents an overview and summary of findings from the PROSPER (Promoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience) Peers project, which for over a decade has sought to illuminate how adolescent friendship networks channel and facilitate the spread of developmental outcomes such as substance use, other risky behavio...

Objective: Scalable strategies to reduce the time burden and increase contact tracing efficiency are crucial during early waves and peaks of infectious transmission. Design: We enrolled a cohort of SARS-CoV-2-positive seed cases into a peer recruitment study testing social network methodology and a novel electronic platform to increase contact t...

Much of what we know about the intellectual landscape of anglophone demography comes from two sources: subjective narratives authored by leaders in the field, whose reviews and observations are derived from their research experience and field-specific knowledge; and professional histories covering the field's foundational controversies, which tend...

Substantive racial integration depends on both access to cross-race friendship opportunities (demographic integration) and the development of stable and rewarding social relations (social integration). Yet, we know little about the relative stability of cross-race friendship nominations over time. Cross-race friendships are also experienced within...

Background: Childhood obesity disproportionately impacts Hispanics in the United States (US), the nation's largest ethnic minority population. However, even among Hispanic children, those born in the US are at increased risk of developing obesity than those not born in the US (i.e. first-generation Hispanics). The objective of this study is to ass...

Introduction: Fragmentation in heart failure (HF) care transitions occur disproportionately among those adversely affected by social drivers of health. Social network analysis (SNA) may provide new insights into barriers to equitable care. Purpose: To assess the nature and structure of clinician networks across health system settings of care during...

Globally, restrictions implemented to limit the spread of COVID-19 have highlighted deeply rooted social divisions, raising concerns about differential impacts on members of different groups. Inequalities among households of different castes are ubiquitous in certain regions of India. Drawing on a novel data set of 8,564 households in Uttar Pradesh...

Concern over social scientists’ inability to reproduce empirical research has spawned a vast and rapidly growing literature. The size and growth of this literature make it difficult for newly interested academics to come up to speed. Here, we provide a formal text modeling approach to characterize the entirety of the field, which allows us to summa...

The 100th anniversary of Social Forces provides a rich opportunity to reflect on the history of the journal and changes to sociology as a whole. Using a series of formal text-analytic methods, we describe the shifting intellectual landscape of Social Forces publications. We uncover a wide diversity of topics that shift over time reflecting the brea...

Wealth ownership is a critical component of economic well-being, and wealth in early adulthood provides important clues about the trajectories along which individuals move throughout their lives. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we find an association between growing up rural and adult wealth that v...

Missing data is a common, difficult problem for network studies. Unfortunately, there are few clear guidelines about what a researcher should do when faced with incomplete information. We take up this problem in the third paper of a three-paper series on missing network data. Here, we compare the performance of different imputation methods across a...

There is a clear consensus among climate scientists about the reality and serious consequences of anthropogenic climate change. However, a vocal minority challenges this consensus. While some research has drawn attention to how conservative foundations support these anti-consensus scientists, less is known about how these scholars are embedded with...

Recent controversies about wearing masks and getting vaccinated to slow the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 highlight the potential for individual rights and decision making to create widespread community-level outcomes. There is little work demonstrating the collective spillover effects of pandemic mitigation efforts. The authors contribute by...

Background Effective patient care transitions require consideration of social and clinical context, yet how these factors and relational processes in care coordination relate remains poorly described. This case report aims to describe provider networks and the clinical care and social context involved during longitudinal care transitions across set...

Background Physicians do not prescribe opioid analgesics for pain treatment equally across groups, and such disparities may pose significant public health concerns. Although research suggests that institutional constraints and cultural stereotypes influence doctors’ treatment of pain, prior quantitative evidence is mixed. The objective of this seco...

Exchange is a foundational form of human interaction underlying more complex forms of cooperation and collaboration. Exchange scholars have demonstrated that both the structure of exchange relationships, and the cultural logics that govern them influence the benefits that exchange partners contribute and receive. These factors influence behavior by...

New COVID-19 diagnoses have dropped faster than expected in the United States. Interpretations of the decrease have focused on changing factors (e.g. mask-wearing, vaccines, etc.), but predictive models largely ignore heterogeneity in behaviorally-driven exposure risks among distinct groups. We present a simplified compartmental model with differen...

This chapter presents an introduction to the basic concepts central to social network analysis. Written for those with little experience in the approach, the chapter aims to provide the necessary tools to dig deeper into exploring social networks via the subsequent chapters in this volume. It begins by introducing the building blocks of networks—no...

People constantly interact with each other and their environment, and these interactions—with whom and with what they interact—are not random. Interactions at multiple levels (cellular, neurological, social, physical, environmental) shape one’s experiences and affect health and well-being. These interactions can be represented as a set of networks...

Peers play a significant role in adolescent mental well-being and suicidality. While social integration among peers is often assumed to benefit mental health, a growing literature recognizes that peer relationships can increase suicidality. Conceptualizing friends’ disclosure of mental distress as a stressor on teens’ own mental health clarifies ho...

Background: Physicians do not prescribe opioid analgesics for pain treatment equally across groups, and such disparities may pose significant public health concerns. While research suggests that institutional constraints and cultural stereotypes influence doctors’ treatment of pain, prior quantitative evidence is mixed. The objective of this second...

Peers play an important role in adolescence, a time when self-harm arises as a major health risk, but little is known about the social networks of adolescents who cut. Peer network positions can affect mental distress related to cutting or provide direct social motivations for self-harm. This study uses PROSPER survey data from U.S. high school stu...

The current study compares estimates of peer influence from an analytic approach that explicitly address network processes with those from traditional approaches that do not. Using longitudinal network data from the PROmoting School–community–university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience peers project, we obtain estimates of social influence on mul...

Faculty development programs have tended to focus on low levels of evaluation such as participant satisfaction rather than assess the actual changes that training has brought about in the workplace. This has prompted scholars to suggest using social network analysis as a means to provide a more rigorous method of evaluating the impact of faculty de...

The intergenerational transfer of assets helps create and maintain wealth inequality over time, and cohort differences in these wealth transfers provide unique insights into the changing mechanisms that lead to inequality. We examine cohort differences in asset transfers in two ways. First, we explore whether there are general cohort differences. S...

Ecological Network Analysis (ENA) combines modeling and analysis used to investigate the structure, function, and evolution of ecosystems and other complex systems. ENA is applied to network models that trace the movement of thermodynamically conserved energy or matter through the system. Investigators use ENA to answer a range of questions such as...

Social isolation is broadly associated with poor mental health and risky behaviors in adolescence, a time when peers are critical for healthy development. However, expectations for isolates’ substance use remain unclear. Isolation in adolescence may signal deviant attitudes or spur self-medication, resulting in higher substance use. Conversely, iso...

Young men are important targets in HIV prevention in Tanzania and throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Anxiety and depression are common among youth and may be important predictors of HIV risk behaviors; evidence of these relationships in high-risk populations is needed. Using baseline and 1 year follow-up assessments from an HIV prevention trial we asse...

The present study tests the assumption that peers wield sufficient influence to induce sexual homophily (i.e., similarities in sexual experiences). Because girls face greater stigma for their sexual experiences than do boys, sexual homophily may be greater in girls' friendship networks than in boys'. Stochastic actor‐based models were used to analy...

Background: Young men living in Dar es Salaam's informal settlements face environmental stressors that may expose them to multiple determinants of HIV risk including poor mental health and risky sexual behavior norms. We aimed to understand how these co-occurring risk factors not only independently affect men's condom use and sexual partner concur...

Significance What drives scientists’ public support for contentious policy issues? We examined associations between peer exposure and academic specialization on public declarations about research involving potentially pandemic pathogens. Although we found significant peer associations for everyone, they are strongest among the opposition. Conversel...

For sexually transmitted infections like HIV to propagate through a population, there must be a path linking susceptible cases to currently infectious cases. The existence of such paths depends in part on the degree distribution . Here, we use simulation methods to examine how two features of the degree distribution affect network connectivity: Mea...

Many tools that neuroscientists use to trace the complex topography of the human brain draw on the neuroscience literature to yield “metanalyses” or “syntheses of data.” These approaches conflate rhetorical connections in the literature with physical connections in the brain. By contrast, the model presented in this chapter seeks not a topography o...

Missing data is an important, but often ignored, aspect of a network study. Measurement validity is affected by missing data, but the level of bias can be difficult to gauge. Here, we describe the effect of missing data on network measurement across widely different circumstances. In Part I of this study (Smith and Moody, 2013), we explored the eff...

Structurally cohesive subgroups are a powerful and mathematically rigorous way to characterize network robustness. Their strength lies in the ability to detect strong connections among vertices that not only have no neighbors in common, but that may be distantly separated in the graph. Unfortunately, identifying cohesive subgroups is a computationa...

Treating people as cases that are proximate in a behavior space—representing lifestyles—rather than as markers of single variables has a long history in sociology. Yet, because it is difficult to find analytically tractable ways to implement this idea, this approach is rarely used. We take seriously the idea that people are whole packages, and we u...

Objectives: To examine the leadership attributes and collaborative connections of local actors from the health sector and those outside the health sector in a major place-based health initiative. Methods: We used survey data from 340 individuals in 4 Healthy Places North Carolina counties from 2014 to assess the leadership attributes (awareness,...

Sociological explanations for economic success tend toward measures of embeddedness in long-standing social institutions, such as race and gender, or personal skills represented mainly by educational attainment. Instead, we seek a distinctively social foundation for success by investigating the long-term association between high school popularity a...

Purpose: Network diffusion depends on both the pattern and timing of relations, but the relative effects of timing and structure remain unclear. Here, we first show that concurrency (relations that overlap in time) increases epidemic potential by opening new routes in the network. Because this is substantively similar to adding contact paths, we n...

Social networks are not homogeneous but typically grouped into subsets of strongly reconnected groups. Here we review the literature on structural cohesion and clustering in networks. We divide our review into sections based on overall measures of cohesion and approaches to finding subgroups in larger networks.

This article expands research on normative school transitions (NSTs) from elementary to middle school or middle to high school by examining the extent to which they disrupt structures of friendship networks. Social network analysis is used to quantify aspects of connectedness likely relevant to student experiences of social support. Data were drawn...

Social network influence on young people's sexual behavior is understudied in sub-Saharan Africa. Previous research identified networks of mostly young men in Dar es Salaam who socialize in "camps". This study describes network characteristics within camps and their relationship to young men's concurrent sexual partnerships. We conducted surveys wi...

We compare the performance of multiple respondent-driven sampling estimators under different sample recruitment conditions in hidden populations of female sex workers in the midst of China's ongoing epidemic of sexually transmitted infections. We first examine empirically calibrated simulations grounded in survey data to evaluate the relative perfo...

China's HIV prevalence is low, mainly concentrated among female sex workers (FSWs), their clients, men who have sex with men, and the stable partners of members of these high-risk groups. We evaluate the contribution to the spread of HIV of China's regime of heterosexual relations, of the structure of heterosexual networks, and of the attributes of...

Research on the quality and cost of care traditionally focuses on individual physicians or medical groups. Social network theory suggests that the care a patient receives also depends on the network of physicians with whom a patient's physician is connected. The objectives of the study are: (1) identify physician networks; (2) determine whether the...

The proximity of dating partners in peer friendship networks has important implications for the diffusion of health-risk behaviors and adolescent social development. We derive two competing hypotheses for the friendship–romance association. The first predicts that daters are proximally positioned in friendship networks prior to dating and that oppo...

Network ecologists investigate the structure, function, and evolution of ecological systems using network models and analyses. For example, network techniques have been used to study community interactions (i.e., food-webs, mutualisms), gene flow across landscapes, and the sociality of individuals in populations. The work presented here uses a bibl...

Adolescent societies-whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships-exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, bec...

How can we simultaneously capture the diversity of family forms without imposing pre-defined restrictions on the meanings of family? Modern family structures are characterized primarily by the diversity of forms across settings–a feature that beguiles standard comparisons relying only on biology or legal household arrangements. Here, we explore usi...

Is domain-spanning beneficial? Can it promote innovation? Classic research on recombinant innovation suggests that domain-spanning fosters the accumulation of diverse information and can thus be a springboard for fresh ideas—most of which emanate from the merger of extant ideas from distinct realms. But domain-spanning is also challenging to produc...

Visualizing data is central to social scientific work. Despite a promising early beginning, sociology has lagged in the use of visual tools. We review the history and current state of visualization in sociology. Using examples throughout, we discuss recent developments in ways of seeing raw data and presenting the results of statistical modeling. W...

A central theme of economic sociology has been to highlight the complexity and diversity of real world markets, but many network models of economic social structure ignore this feature and rely instead on stylized one-dimensional characterizations. Here, the authors return to the basic insight of structural diversity in economic sociology. Using th...

We explore the network coverage of a sample of female sex workers (FSWs) in China recruited through Respondent Drive Sampling (RDS) as part of an effort to evaluate the claim of RDS of population representation with empirical data. We take advantage of unique information on the social networks of FSWs obtained from two overlapping studies - RDS and...

Cognitive neuroscience, as a discipline, links the biological systems studied by neuroscience to the processing constructs studied by psychology. By mapping these relations throughout the literature of cognitive neuroscience, we visualize the semantic structure of the discipline and point to directions for future research that will advance its inte...

Codebook for the 1st wave of the Research Triangle Entrepreneurship Study, conducted in 1989-1991. Several publications resulted from this study. We are making this codebook available so that others can see the questions we asked and the measures we used. We hope others will replicate our study. Contact Howard Aldrich for more info.

This memo describes how we designed the 2 wave panel study of nascent entrepreneurs & operating entrepreneurs in the Research Triangle Area of North Carolina in the late 1980s. Other memos on this web site show the codebooks used to code the survey data obtained from this design. If you are interested survey research on entrepreneurs, you might wan...

Network measures assume a census of a well-bounded population. This level of coverage is rarely achieved in practice, however, and we have only limited information on the robustness of network measures to incomplete coverage. This paper examines the effect of node-level missingness on 4 classes of network measures: centrality, centralization, topol...

This study addresses not only influence and selection of friends as sources of similarity in alcohol use, but also peer processes leading drinkers to be chosen as friends more often than non-drinkers, which increases the number of adolescents subject to their influence. Analyses apply a stochastic actor-based model to friendship networks assessed f...

We test the hypothesis that an evidence-based preventive intervention will change adolescent friendship networks to reduce the potential for peer influence toward antisocial behavior. Altering adolescents' friendship networks in this way is a promising avenue for achieving setting-level prevention benefits such as expanding the reach and durability...

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a method for recruiting "hidden" populations through a network-based, chain and peer referral process. RDS recruits hidden populations more effectively than other sampling methods and promises to generate unbiased estimates of their characteristics. RDS's faithful representation of hidden populations relies on th...

The supplemental online material accompanying this article was not the final version. The final version is now published online. The publisher regrets the error.

Therapeutic communities (TC s) have a strong record of maintaining a high quality social climate on prison units. One possible reason for this is the system of mutual monitoring among TC residents, based on the assumption that peer affirmation of behavior in accord with TC norms and peer correction of behavior contrary to TC norms will lead to incr...

To find out, we measure co-voting similarity networks in the US Senate and trace individual careers over time. Standard network visualization tools fail on dense highly clustered networks, so we used two aggregation strategies to clarify positional mobility over time. First, clusters of Senators who often vote the same way capture coalitions , and...

Objectives: We examined how risk behaviors differentially connect a population at high risk for sexually transmitted infections. Methods: Starting from observed networks representing the full risk network and the risk network among respondents only, we constructed a series of edge-deleted counterfactual networks that selectively remove sex ties,...

Although studies have demonstrated that an adolescent's parents and friends both influence adolescent substance use, it is not known whether the parenting experienced by one's friends also affects one's own use. Drawing on conceptions of shared parenting and the tenets of coercion theory, we investigated the extent to which three domains of parenti...

Difficult-to-reach populations are frequently sampled through various link-tracing based designs, which rely on interpersonal networks to identify members of the population. This article examines the substantive returns to one such multiple-link tracing design in the Colorado Springs "Project 90" HIV risk networks study. Cross-links were respondent...

There are two very good reasons to study the social organization of science, and Kronegger, Ferligoj and Doreian’s paper exemplify both (henceforth K, F, D). First, we rarely have such rich and detailed data in most other areas of social life. Because science is a written social sphere where credit and authorship matter greatly, we have rich data o...

A majority of school-based prevention programs target the modification of setting-level social dynamics, either explicitly (e.g., by changing schools' organizational, cultural or instructional systems that influence children's relationships), or implicitly (e.g., by altering behavioral norms designed to influence children's social affiliations and...

This paper introduces new longitudinal network data from the “Promoting School-Community-University Partnerships to Enhance Resilience” or “PROSPER” peers project. In 28 communities, grade-level sociometric friendship nominations were collected from two cohorts of middle school students as they moved from 6th, to 9th grade. As an illustration and d...

Gangs and group-level processes were once central phenomena for criminological theory and research. By the mid-1970's, however, gang research was primarily displaced by studies of individual behavior using randomized self-report surveys, a shift that also removed groups from the theoretical foreground. In this project, we return to the group level...

Moving patients from low-performing hospitals to high-performing hospitals may improve patient outcomes. These transfers may be particularly important in critical care, where small relative improvements can yield substantial absolute changes in survival. To characterize the existing critical care network in terms of the pattern of transfers. In a r...

Concurrent sexual partnerships may help to explain the disproportionately high prevalence of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections among African Americans. The persistence of such disparities would also require strong assortative mixing by race. We examined descriptive evidence from 4 nationally representative US surveys and found consisten...

Social network analysis has a long history in sociology, but interest in this topic has broadened dramatically since 1995. This article reviews the origins and key concepts from the sociological literature on social networks, and outlines the network approach to economic behaviour (see Zuckerman J Econ Lit 46, 545–565, 2003 or White Markets from ne...

Girls and boys were more similar than different in the structural features of their social groups and networks in early adolescence. Boys' groups were somewhat larger than girls' groups, but contrary to prominent theoretical views, there were no systematic sex differences in tight-knittedness or in the salience of status hierarchies.

Social network data must accurately reflect actors’ relationships to properly estimate network features. Here, we examine multiple reports of sexual, drug-sharing and social tie data on high-risk networks in Colorado Springs. By comparing multiple reports on the same ties, we can evaluate the reliability of this study's network data. Our findings s...

How has sociology evolved over the last 40 years? In this paper, we examine networks built on thousands of sociology-relevant papers to map sociology’s position in the wider social sciences and identify changes in the most prominent research fronts in the discipline. We find first that sociology seems to have traded centrality in the field of socia...

Recent reflections on the state of publications in sociology (Becker, 2003) suggest that article titles are getting longer. I test this hypothesis with data from ASR since inception and a wider sample of papers from Sociological Abstracts between 1963 and 1999. My results indicate a rapid and widespread increase in title length. Further analyses su...

While we typically count the number of people directly affected by violence, war and state action with casualty reports, we often ignore how these people are embedded in larger networks. In this paper, I estimate the number of people who know somebody who has been killed, injured or detained in the US war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, and t...

Increased interest in longitudinal social networks and the recognition that visualization fosters theoretical insight create a need for dynamic network visualizations, or network “movies.” This article confronts theoretical questions surrounding the temporal representations of social networks and technical questions about how best to link network c...