Description:

Department of Statistics 2020-2021 Seminar Series (joint with Biostatistics) - Winter 2021

“Modeling Interventions on Social Networks”

Tracy M. Sweet, Associate Professor, Measurement, Statistics & Evaluation, Department of Human Development & Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland

Abstract: There are some interventions aimed at changing the ways in which individuals interact, and social networks are particularly useful for quantifying these changes. For many of these interventions, the ultimate goal is to change some individual outcome of interest, and social networks act as a natural mediator. For example, in an educational intervention the goal is to change the behavior of students but changes in peer networks are actually the mechanism through which the intervention is effective. In this talk, I will introduce social network models, present a framework modeling social networks as outcomes and mediators and present some recently developed models that embed networks into mediation models.