Peter V. Marsden

• Harvard University

This article reviews recent methodological research that bears on the collection of egocentric network data. It begins with background on setting egocentric network boundaries and principal types of instruments that obtain information about such networks. It then discusses innovations in data collection and studies of data quality. The bulk of thes...

Social networks are ubiquitous. The science of networks has shaped how researchers and society understand the spread of disease, the precursors of loneliness, the rise of protest movements, the causes of social inequality, the influence of social media, and much more. Egocentric analysis conceives of each individual, or ego, as embedded in a person...

Peter V. Marsden is the Edith and Benjamin Geisinger Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He received his B.A. in sociology and history at Dartmouth College in 1973 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1975 and 1979 respectively.

In the five decades since its inception in 1971, the General Social Survey (GSS) project has prospectively recorded the current characteristics, backgrounds, behaviors, and attitudes of representative cross sections of American adults covering more than two generations and more than a century of birth cohorts. A foundational resource for contempora...

James S. Coleman, among the most eminent and influential twentieth‐century sociologists, sought to understand and improve the performance of social systems. A prolific contributor to both basic and applied empirical research, social science methodology, and social theory, his Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (1964) established an intellectual...

This article examines how processes of aging, generational shifts, and changes over historical time periods shape differences in work values in the United States. Our analyses of data from the General Social Survey and the International Social Survey Program show that changes over historical time periods are most consistently responsible for differ...

This chapter suggests that life course events create opportunities for contact with some new types of persons while reducing the accessibility of others, and thereby shape social networks. Examination of General Social Survey data on social networks and informal socializing activity offers considerable support for the perspective set forth. Family-...

An organizational survey assembles data on the characteristics or attributes of a large number of organizational entities by administering interviews or questionnaires to organizational informants or participants. Data collected may pertain to entities ranging from teams or departments to entire establishments, multi‐establishment firms, or interor...

Measures of network centrality assess the importance of elements in arrays of relationships linking entities, such as persons, organizations, or documents. Important entities may have many contacts, be related to other important entities, be near other entities, or be positioned between others. Most centrality measures refer to entities, but some r...

Order and stability are tenuous and fragile. People have to work to create and sustain a semblance of stability and order in their lives and in their organizations and larger communities. Order on the Edge of Chaos compares different ideas about how we coordinate and cooperate. The ideas come from 'micro-sociology', and they offer new answers to th...

Employment relations are implicit or explicit contractual arrangements that specify the reciprocal expectations and obligations linking employers and employees. They encompass a wide range of phenomena, including work organization, governance, evaluation, and rewards. During the past quarter century, the standard employment relationship that was no...

This article examines changes in workers' work values for the period 1973-2006 using General Social Survey data. We assess the relative importance that workers assign to high income, as opposed to security, advancement, short hours and "importance and sense of accomplishment." The latter ranked highest throughout this period, but the relative prior...

Social Trends in American Life assembles a team of leading researchers to provide unparalleled insight into how American social attitudes and behaviors have changed since the 1970s. Drawing on the General Social Survey--a social science project that has tracked demographic and attitudinal trends in the United States since 1972--it offers a window i...

This chapter assesses trends in informal social connectedness over a 34-year period beginning in 1974, focusing on four forms of informal socializing measured regularly by the General Social Survey. In recent controversy and debate over this subject, some studies report contraction in social networks, contrasting with others that indicate stability...

This chapter considers subjective well-being at work—both perceived security and job satisfaction. Recent changes in U.S. economic organization have made employment more precarious. Jobs are viewed as less secure than in past decades, after adjusting for cyclical variations in unemployment. Insecurity appears to have grown fastest among the upper s...

This book assembles a team of leading researchers to provide unparalleled insight into how American social attitudes and behaviors have changed since the 1970s. Drawing on the General Social Survey—a social science project that has tracked demographic and attitudinal trends in the United States since 1972—it offers a window into diverse facets of A...

his chapter assesses trends in informal social connectedness over a 34-year period beginning in 1974, focusing on four forms of informal socializing measured regularly by the General Social Survey. In recent controversy and debate over this subject, some studies report contraction in social networks, contrasting with others that indicate stability....

This chapter assesses trends in informal social connectedness over a 34-year period beginning in 1974, focusing on four forms of informal socializing measured regularly by the General Social Survey. In recent controversy and debate over this subject, some studies report contraction in social networks, contrasting with others that indicate stability...

Several previous General Social Survey-based studies have revealed increasing acceptance of nontraditional gender roles. This chapter builds upon and extends these findings. It shows that adults became less predisposed toward a “separate spheres” conception holding that women should specialize in caring for children and households while men predomi...

We welcome this opportunity to revisit “Measuring Tie Strength” (Marsden and Campbell 1984) in light of more recent social network studies. When we wrote our article, the field of social networks was in the process of emerging as a recognized area of study, though it had many precursors (Freeman 2004). Since then, interest in network phenomena has...

Symptoms of angina and dyspnea predict coronary artery disease and death less well in women than in men. Greater somatosensory amplification - a psychosocial propensity to report symptoms of physical discomfort - may lead women to report relatively high levels of angina and dyspnea for reasons unrelated to coronary disease, reducing their associati...

Many questions about the social organization of medicine and health services involve interdependencies among social actors that may be depicted by networks of relationships. Social network studies have been pursued for some time in social science disciplines, where numerous descriptive methods for analyzing them have been proposed. More recently, i...

The goal of this study was to compare the quality of care received by HIV patients who report that their primary HIV care provider is a physician, a nurse practitioner (NP) or a physician assistant (PA) to that of patients who cannot identify a primary HIV provider. We used data from patients who participated in the HIV Cost and Services Utilizatio...

Compared to single-clinician care, care provided by multiple clinicians might result in higher-quality care, especially if some of them have condition-specific expertise and complementary knowledge, skills, and roles. Individual physician continuity, which has been shown to be associated with care quality, necessarily decreases when care is provide...

To determine whether a selected set of indicators can represent a single overall quality construct. Cross sectional study of data abstracted during an evaluation of an initiative to improve quality of care for people with HIV. 69 sites in 30 states. Medical records of 9020 patients. Adjusted performance rates at site level for eight measures of qua...

Physicians often rely on colleagues for new information and advice about the care of their patients. Evaluate the network of influential discussions among primary care physicians in a hospital-based academic practice. Survey of physicians about influential discussions with their colleagues regarding women's health issues. We used social network ana...

We sought to assess whether participation in a quality-improvement collaborative changed care processes, systems, and organization of outpatient human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) clinics. We surveyed clinicians, medical directors, and HIV program administrators before and after an 18-month quality improvement collaborative at 54 intervention and 3...

We sought to assess which patient, physician, and organizational factors are related to voluntary physician switching among human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patients. We analyzed the results from a 3-wave survey of patients conducted by the HIV Cost and Services Utilization Study (HCSUS), a longitudinal study of a nationally representati...

James S. Coleman ranks among the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century. Coleman's scholarship pursued several linked lines of inquiry in parallel, but centered on understanding and improving the performance of social systems. He led a study of inequality in educational opportunity (Coleman, Campbell et al. 1966) that had a major im...

Drawing on a recent survey of establishments in the United States, the authors examine how nonprofit, public, and for-profit establishments vary in the use of high-performance work organization (HPWO) practices that offer opportunities for participation in decision making (via self-directed teams and offline committees), enhance the capacity for pa...

Women with HIV infection have lagged behind men in receipt of critical health care, but it is not known if those disparities are due in part to where women receive care. We examined differences in care received by HIV-infected women and men in a national sample of Ryan White CARE Act-funded clinics and explored the influence of clinic characteristi...

To assess the reliability of survey measures of organizational characteristics based on reports of single and multiple informants. Survey of 330 informants in 91 medical clinics providing care to HIV-infected persons under Title III of the Ryan White CARE Act. Cross-sectional survey. Surveys of clinicians and medical directors measured the implemen...

Nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) are primary care providers for patients with HIV in some clinics, but little is known about the quality of care that they provide. To compare the quality of care provided by NPs and PAs with that provided by physicians. Cross-sectional analysis. 68 HIV care sites, funded by Ryan White Compreh...

Organizations are increasingly externalizing work activities, but vary as to where and how they do so. Using a US employer survey, we examine within- and between-organization differences in the use of employment intermediaries such as temporary help agencies and contract companies, in whether external workers from these intermediaries supplement on...

This chapter surveys the career and scholarship of James S. Coleman. It tracks scholarly usage of his work, with attention to references after 1995 and the subject areas in which its use is concentrated. At base a scholar of problems in social organization, Coleman made influential contributions that range across the sociology of education, policy...

There is debate over the types of physicians who should treat patients with complex chronic medical conditions such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. We sought to assess the relationship between specialty training and expertise and the quality of care delivered to patients with HIV infection. We selected random samples of HIV-infecte...

Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis, first published in 2005, presents the most important developments in quantitative models and methods for analyzing social network data that have appeared during the 1990s. Intended as a complement to Wasserman and Faust's Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, it is a collection of articles...

The Ryan White CARE Act supports comprehensive care to persons with HIV infection. With an annual budget of over $1 billion, it is the largest federally funded programme for HIV care in the USA. We analysed data from the HIV Costs and Services Utilization Study, a nationally representative sample of HIV patients. Patient data were collected in 1996...

Multi-institution collaborative quality improvement programs are a well-established and broadly applicable quality improvement strategy, but there is little systematic assessment their effectiveness. To evaluate the effectiveness of a quality improvement collaborative in improving the quality of care for HIV-infected patients. Controlled pre- and p...

Flexible staffing arrangements (such as temporary, contract, and part-time work) enable organizations to externalize administrative control or limit the duration of employment. We examine the prevalence and correlates of such arrangements using a recent large, representative survey of US establishments. We first develop a typology of flexible staff...

Name generators used to measure egocentric networks are complex survey questions that make substantial demands on respondents and interviewers alike. They are therefore vulnerable to interviewer effects, which arise when interviewers administer questions differently in ways that affect responses-in this case, the number of names elicited. Van Tilbu...

Egocentric centrality measures (for data on a node’s first-order zone) parallel to Freeman’s [Social Networks 1 (1979) 215] centrality measures for complete (sociocentric) network data are considered. Degree-based centrality is in principle identical for egocentric and sociocentric network data. A closeness measure is uninformative for egocentric d...

This chapter reviews scholarship on how the matching of people to jobs is influenced by networks of interpersonal ties. By all accounts, that role is substantial on both the individual’s side and the employer’s side of the labor market. The mediation of job change and recruitment/selection processes by networks illustrates the embeddedness of labor...

This paper reports on a small (N=50) study of how survey respondents interpret the General Social Survey (GSS)'s “discuss important matters” name generator. The study involved concurrent think-aloud interviews, in which respondents were debriefed about their thought processes immediately after answering the name generator. Analyses of these respons...

This chapter examines the information sources that U.S. employers use in the course of internal staffing, that is, when promoting or transferring employees. We focus on the use of methods involving informal ties: referrals and direct approaches to candidates for promotion or transfer. Such ties may produce 'social capital' by providing employers wi...

PART ONE: THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS STUDY Organizational Properties and Practices - Arne L Kalleberg et al Design of the National Organizations Study - Joe L Spaeth and Diane P O'Rourke American Organizations and Their Environments - Peter V Marsden, Cynthia R Cook, and David Knoke PART TWO: ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES Bureaucratic Structures for Co...

Data on a nationally representative sample of US establishments reveal that letters of reference are the most common approach to screening and selecting applicants for employment. Physical examinations, skills/proficiency tests, and tests for drug and/or alcohol use are used by substantial minorities of workplaces; very few draw on intelligence/per...

This article reviews the content and development of a topical module on aspects of culture that appeared in the 1993 General Social Survey. This process drew on many extant survey resources for studying culture, and the interview schedule it produced focused on three elements of culture: personal values, predispositions toward particular strategies...

This article provides a descriptive overview of the work establishments in the National Organizations Study (NOS). It begins by reviewing their auspices, industry settings, and composition. Next, it introduces the survey items and scales used to measure coordination and control structures including structural differentiation, formalization, decentr...

The NOS survey data show that U.S. establishments use a variety of methods for publicizing the availability of job opportunities to potential workers. Newspaper advertisements and informal referrals from employees are used most frequently. Referrals are more often used together with other approaches than as a sole recruitment strategy; those establ...

Measures of coordination and control techniques—including structural complexity, formalization, decentralization, and firm internal labor markets—are related to one another in theoretically anticipated ways for the diverse set of establishments in the National Organizations Study. Quite strong differences in structure between large and small organi...

Network studies of social influence The study of social influence is a strategic arena for social network research; it links the structure of social relations to attitudes and behaviors of the actors who compose a network. Such research is crucial to demonstrating the explanatory potential of the network approach by exhibiting what Laumann (1979) t...

Many measures based on egocentric network data, such as age composition or (local) network density, can be viewed as 'aggregate' measures: they are mean values of the alter attributes or the dyadic attributes that fall within a given respondent's egocentric network. Internal consistency methods of classical test theory are not suitable for assessin...

Network analysis interested in social influence examine the social foundations for influence-the social relations that provide a basis for the alteration of an attitude or behavior by one network actor in response to another This article contrasts two empirical accounts of social influence (structural cohesion and equivalence) and describes the soc...

Data obtained from the 1991 “Work Organizations” module of the General Social Survey (GSS) reveal a small but significant tendency for employed men to display higher organizational commitment (OC) than employed women do. This article examines the gender differences and factors that arguably heighten or dampen it. The authors consider both job model...

We compare and contrast the representativeness, practicality, and cost of five generally available and commonly used organizational samping frames: direct enumeration, unemployment insurance (UI) forms, Dun and Bradstreet's Market Identifier (DMI) files, the White Pages of the telephone directory, and Chamber of Commerce membership directories. All...

Data on social networks may be gathered for all ties linking elements of a closed population (“complete” network data) or for the sets of ties surrounding sampled individual units (“egocentric” network data). Network data have been obtained via surveys and questionnaires, archives, observation, diaries, electronic traces, and experiments. Most meth...

Research on entrepreneurship encompasses all stages in the life cycle of businesses, with the period around the initial founding arguably the most important. Decisions made in the crucial early days regarding products, markets, funding, and personnel substantially shape the subsequent course of the business. Despite the obvious importance of this p...

We replicate and extend studies of job-matching by Lin, Ensel, and Vaughn (1981) and Bridges and Villemez (1986), concentrating on the effects of social network resources on the following outcomes of job-changes: occupational prestige, wages, industrial sector, firm size, possession of authority, and closeness of supervision. Our replication confir...

Patterns of inbreeding (or homophily) and social distance in data from the 1985 General Social Survey on dyads discussing important matters are examined. Stratifying variables include age, education, race/ethnicity, religion, and sex. Discussion relations are most constrained by race/ etnicity, and least by sex and education. Inbreeding effects are...

Selectivity bias is a danger whenever observations are systematically excluded from a data set on the basis of a dependent variable, whether this exclusion is explicit or implicit. If present, the problem has severe consequences for the validity of statistical estimates of effects. The problem is of importance to the analysis of survey network data...

Aspects of interpersonal networks in which Americans discuss "important matters" are examined using data from the 1985 General Social Survey. These are the first survey network data representative of the American population. The networks are small, kin-centered, relatively dense, and homogeneous in comparison with the sample of respondents. Bivaria...

We address two questions central to the "network as resources" argument, using network data from two mass surveys. First, how is range best measured? We identify six dimensions of range: one each reflecting network size and complexity, and two each representing density and diversity. Second, what is the nature of the relationship between SES and so...

Examines 2 related models - collapsibility and internal homogeneity - for analyzing occupational mobility tables, by reformulating them as restricted latent class models in which the unobserved class variables are made explicit. The parametric representation of both models provides additional insight into how they differ. The latent class model als...

Social structural analysis is an approach to studying social structure that emphasizes the relatedness of units or actors, and gives well‐defined meaning to structural concepts through the methods and techniques of social network analysis. Three broad strategies for representation of social structures have been developed: topo‐logical, graph‐theore...