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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
How can individuals who engage in underground criminal activities be located when they are mixed together with a non-deviant population? We describe the preliminary results of an effort to locate persons engaged in criminal and socially sanctioned activities in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) data by modeling the structure of competition between deviant and non-deviant activities in a dynamic Blau Space. This represents an important extension of McPherson’s (1983) ecology of affiliation framework and demonstrates the compatibility of this approach with the study of deviance. Challenges and possible solutions to theoretical and methodological problems of Blau Space modeling will be discussed. Particularly, we will describe a way to merge Blau Space analysis with an overlapping ties approach. We also present a new software tool, called BlauGraph, which offers a new way to visualize networks and automate the identification of the most important structural parameters defining association. In combination, these new techniques and software tools provide new avenues for the identification of criminals, terrorists, and other members of Covert Social Networks (CSNs) when only incomplete information is available. The work not only suggests applications for substantive real-world problems, but offers deep insights for network theory more generally.
Host: Sasha Gutfraind, T-5, CNLS, gutfraind@lanl.gov