Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.

Understanding network characteristics using a simple dataset

Using data from a Kyiv HIV survey, the authors present a method for mapping network characteristics using a simple survey question: “How many X’s do you know?”

Author(s)
Ian Laga, Le Bao, and Xiaoyue Niu
Journal
Journal of the American Statistical Association
Citation
Ian Laga, Le Bao, and Xiaoyue Niu (2023) A Correlated Network Scale-Up Model: Finding the Connection Between Subpopulations, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 118:543, 1515-1524, DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2023.2165929 Copy
Abstract

Aggregated Relational Data (ARD), formed from “How many X’s do you know?” questions, is a powerful tool for learning important network characteristics with incomplete network data. Compared to traditional survey methods, ARD is attractive as it does not require a sample from the target population and does not ask respondents to self-reveal their own status. This is helpful for studying hard-to-reach populations like female sex workers who may be hesitant to reveal their status. From December 2008 to February 2009, the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) collected ARD from 10,866 respondents to estimate the size of HIV-related groups in Ukraine. To analyze this data, we propose a new ARD model which incorporates respondent and group covariates in a regression framework and includes a bias term that is correlated between groups. We also introduce a new scaling procedure using the correlation structure to further reduce biases. The resulting size estimates of those most-at-risk of HIV infection can improve the HIV response efficiency in Ukraine. Additionally, the proposed model allows us to better understand two network features without the full network data: (a) What characteristics affect who respondents know, and (b) How is knowing someone from one group related to knowing people from other groups. These features can allow researchers to better recruit marginalized individuals into the prevention and treatment programs. Our proposed model and several existing NSUM models are implemented in the networkscaleup R package. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

“Ethnographic lawyering” combines law and ethnography

Drawing on experience in legal cases resulting from the U.S. war on terror, the author uses “ethnographic lawyering” to investigate conspiracy theories involving Al Qaeda.

Author(s)
Darryl Li
Journal
American Anthropologist
Citation
Darryl Li. 2023. “ How to read a case: Ethnographic lawyering, conspiracy, and the origins of Al Qaeda.” American Anthropologist 125: 559–569. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13873 Copy
Abstract

This article delineates a particular orientation to combining professional legal training and anthropological scholarship that I call ethnographic lawyering. Ethnographic lawyering takes legal form as an object of anthropological analysis, loosely inspired by the Marxist jurist Evgeny Pashukanis's theorization of law as a social relation. If ethnographic method in anthropology entails theorizing from the concepts and experiences of interlocutors, then ethnographic lawyering analytically centers the subjectivities, logics, and relationalities that legal form both presupposes and animates. Ethnographic lawyering brings to light the contingent lives of legal form. To demonstrate this method, the article uses the example of conspiracy in early US court cases involving Al Qaeda, informed by the author's experiences as an attorney and anthropologist in litigation arising from the war on terror. An ethnographic lawyering approach illuminates how conspiracy's distinct forms in criminal law, the law of evidence, and tort law each bring far-flung subjects, events, and actions together into reified entities even as they atomize and recombine social relations. This dynamic tension resembles the vertiginous nature of conspiracy theorizing in general.

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