Tomáš Diviák

Tomáš Diviák
The University of Manchester · Department of Criminology / Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis

Doctor of Philosophy

About

44
Publications
10,839
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243
Citations
Introduction
My research focuses mainly on social network analysis (SNA), most prominently statistical models for network data, and on analytical sociology and criminology. I am interested in the application of SNA, predominantly to criminal networks, but also to political, organizational, health-related, or historical networks. I find the study of structure and dynamics of human networks to be intriguing and crucial for our understanding of social reality. Personal website: https://tomasdiviak.com

Publications

Publications (44)
Article
Full-text available
Group work in classrooms is employed by teachers across all levels of education. For group work to be effective, all students should participate equally. Why some students engage in interaction and how group size and composition influence interaction dynamics is a research gap. We employed dynamic actor-oriented models on a sample of 145 Czech lowe...
Article
Full-text available
Contemporary criminology issues are increasingly global, cross-cultural, and multilingual. Moreover, students from different cultural and national backgrounds will need to apply data analytics in their respective contexts. Crime data used in statistical courses should reflect this diversity, and in turn enhance the equality and inclusivity of the t...
Article
Social network analysis can be a powerful tool to better understand the social context of terrorist activities, and it may also offer potential leads for agencies to intervene. Our access to Dutch police information allows us to analyse the relational features of two networks that include actors who planned acts of terrorism and were active in the...
Article
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Rotations of schoolchildren were considered as a non-pharmacological intervention in the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigates the impact of different rotation and testing schedules.We built an agent-based model of interactions among pupils and teachers based on a survey in an elementary school in Prague, Czechia. This model contains 624 schoo...
Article
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The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine received widespread international condemnation. In Slovakia, the invasion became a subject of much political discussion with large number of MPs openly advocating Russian interests. This study investigates Slovak political discourse on Facebook in the weeks before and after the invasion began. We examine the dis...
Article
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We provide a brief insight into the integration of Ukrainian refugees in school social networks in the Czech Republic following the mass migration caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our sample contains twelve classrooms with a total of 266 students in grades 5 to 9; 21.05% of the students were of Ukrainian origin. We employed multiplex expo...
Article
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Objectives Criminal networks tend to recover after a disruption, and this recovery may trigger negative unintended consequences by strengthening network cohesion. This study uses a real-world street gang network as a basis for simulating the effect of disruption and subsequent recovery on network structure. Methods This study utilises cohesion and...
Article
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Background: Contact tracing is one of the most effective non-pharmaceutical interventions in the COVID-19 pandemic. This study uses a multi-agent model to investigate the impact of four types of contact tracing strategies to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Methods: In order to analyse individual contact tracing in a reasonably realistic setup, w...
Article
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Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are a legal tool for the nontrial resolution of cases of corruption. Each DPA is accompanied by a Statement of Facts that provides detailed and publicly available textual records of the given cases, including summarized evidence of who was involved, what they committed, and with whom. These statements can be t...
Article
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Corruption, bribery, and white-collar crime are inherently relational phenomena as actors involved in them exchange information, resources, and favours. These exchanges give rise to a network in which the actors are embedded. While this has been often emphasized in the literature, there is a lack of studies actually empirically examining the struct...
Article
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Running across the globe for nearly 2 years, the Covid-19 pandemic keeps demonstrating its strength. Despite a lot of understanding, uncertainty regarding the efficiency of interventions still persists. We developed an age-structured epidemic model parameterized with epidemiological and sociological data for the first Covid-19 wave in the Czech Rep...
Article
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Longitudinal studies of criminal networks are rare yet necessary to assess the adaptation and recovery of criminal networks after disruptions. We study the structural and individual effects of law enforcement disruption on criminal networks using longitudinal data on two Dutch jihadi networks (n1 = 57; n2 = 26). We expect that actors in criminal ne...
Article
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Responses to current environmental challenges, such as the energy transition, require collaboration among diverse actors interacting in complex and conflicting policy settings. This study examines the drivers of inter-organizational collaboration within the conflictual context of Czech coal phase-out by investigating hypotheses on belief homophily,...
Article
Full-text available
Corruption, bribery, and white-collar crime are inherently relational phenomena as actors involved in them exchange information, resources, and favours. These exchanges give rise to a network in which the actors are embedded. While this has been often emphasized in the literature, there is a lack of studies actually empirically examining the struct...
Article
Full-text available
In this study, we investigated the relation between the different stages of women trafficking (i.e. recruitment, entrance, accommodation, labor, and finance) and the structure of five criminal networks involved in women trafficking in the Netherlands ( Ns ranging from 6 to 15). On the one hand, it could be argued that for efficiency and avoidance o...
Article
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The concept of centrality and centrality measures are well-known and frequently used in social network analysis. They are also implemented in numerous software packages. However, that does not mean that it is easy to apply them correctly. This paper aims to introduce the most frequently used centrality measures, but more importantly to point out th...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Rotations of schoolchildren on a weekly basis is one of the nonpharmaceutical interventions often considered in the covid-19 pandemic. This study aims to investigate the impact of different types of rotations in various testing contexts. Methods We built an agent-based model of interactions among pupils and teachers based on an online s...
Preprint
Full-text available
This report presents a technical description of our agent-based epidemic model of a particular middle-sized municipality. We have developed a realistic model with 56 thousand inhabitants and 2.7 millions of social contacts. These form a multi-layer social network that serves as a base of our epidemic simulation. The disease is modeled by our extend...
Article
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The crime gender gap is the difference between the levels of participation of men and women in crime, with men responsible for more crime than women. Recent evidence suggests that the crime gender gap is closing, both in crime in general and in organized crime. However, organized crime differs from other forms of criminal activity in that it entail...
Preprint
Full-text available
Running across the globe for more than a year, the COVID-19 pandemic keeps demonstrating its strength. Despite a lot of understanding, uncertainty regarding the efficiency of interventions still persists. We developed an age-structured epidemic model parameterized with sociological data for the Czech Republic and found that (1) delaying the spring...
Article
Collaboration between members of different criminal groups is an important feature of crime that is considered organised, as it allows criminals to access resources and skills in order to exploit illicit economic opportunities. Collaboration across criminal groups is also difficult and risky due to the lack of institutions supporting peaceful coope...
Article
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Data quality is considered to be among the greatest challenges in research on covert networks. This study identifies six aspects of network data collection, namely nodes, ties, attributes, levels, dynamics, and context. Addressing these aspects presents challenges, but also opens theoretical and methodological opportunities. Furthermore, specific i...
Article
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The present study is an analysis of a Czech political corruption network known as the Rath affairreconstructed with publicly available data. We argue that for the study of criminal networks it is fruitful tofollow a multiplex approach, i.e., to distinguish several interdependent network dimensions and study howthey are interrelated. Relational elem...
Article
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Using data on 32 actors and ties among them drawn from available court files, we combine analytical sociology with statistical models for networks in order to analyse a case of a counterfeit alcohol distribution network from the Czech Republic. We formulate a theory of action and identify relational mechanisms which could explain how the structure...
Article
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This article analyzes a structure of relations among the members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, as reported through their memberships in bilateral and multilateral groups of friendship which establish professional contacts between the Chamber of Deputies and foreign parliaments. We approach the...
Chapter
An essential condition for a public library’s fulfilling its community role is a thorough understanding of its position in the local social network. The approaches used by libraries so far are based on partial, intuitive forms of assessment. In our study, we prove that the analysis of such networks can be based on a theoretically, as well as method...
Article
Full-text available
In 2007, Petrova and Tarrow coined the term transactional activism, arguing that, despite weak individual-level political participation, civil societies in Central and Eastern Europe were surprisingly strong due to their capacity to establish transactional links. Yet the research which followed, relying mostly on quantitative data, has not uncovere...

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