Social Network Blog - r5

The Position Generator:
A catch all term for anything that is social- I like it. I sometimes think that although this is what these authors are hoping to steer clear of, it is what some readers will see to inevitably ensue. In this article the authors state that males benefit much more from access to social capital and nonkin relations in getting more prestigious jobs and higher incomes than females do. Females, in contrast, rely more on human capital (education) to gain job prestige and higher income (p. 75.) I was sort of shocked by this, even though it in many cases seems like woman have to work harder to attain certain rankings and titles in the corporate/professional world. Do you agree with this statement by Lin and co. and if so, why is it that/how do women use education to gain prestige? In just my personal opinion, there will be an equal amount of males and females graduating from Penn this year and I don’t think that women will have a clear advantage over the males- is there another capital that seems more advantageous for women? Also- the authors ask this question as well, but is it advantageous to view both network locations and social resources as indicators of social capital or to postulate network locations as a precursor of social capital?(p. 76)
Professor Hampton’s article was next on my lovely reading during Fall Break. I loved every second of it. Yea, I found some of the findings pretty interesting. I am intrged by their statement about the limitations from the GSS being understated as I too find this to be a factor in the findings. “Measures based on alters who helped respondents with small household tasks and those from who they could borrow a “large sum of money” had the lowest correlations across almost all of the summary measures. Isn’t this low correlation due solely to proximity? If my parents lived in the house to my left and a stranger in the house to my right, I think I would ask my parents every time. Even if they lived a street away or what have you. Would our parents, or those from which we would borrow large sums of money, be the ones we would ask for help from if they lived close or would that create a tie overkill?
The Resource Generator: Van Der Gaag and Snijders
“The results of our empirical basis to the idea that multiple measures are necessary for the measurement of social capital at the individual level, and that an analysis of latent traits is a useful method to distinguish such measures, enabling detailed investigation of the productivity and goal specificity of social capital(26)” Are the more measures included in the study of social capital? I used to think that so many things were necessary to measure it, but at what point does it get out of control and having to many measurements make it immeasurable and chaotic? Yea, subgroups and calculations are fine and good, but that opens up more room for error and more variation among findings.
In the Kwijze-Koning and De Jong article I thought that the different levels of interpretation were almost as hard to dissect as would be pronouncing Karen’s last name. The Data collection structures here seem very up for interpretation and nothing finite seems to be produced. They do highlight the three necessary types of research needed for accurate analysis of social networks, but researching research is not all that captivating for a fall break reader. Is it possible to develop a standard defining how low the density of a communication network can be before it becomes a communication problem? I happen to think not because everyone communicates at different rates and levels.

its taking me awhile to figure out whose blogs i've posted on so here is a list of who has posted on my blog- hopefully this helps and is ok:

melis
g23
r32 x2
r14 x2
ashley
y1
g3 x2
charlie
kat
jen