4 Social Networks in Rural Tamil Nadu

This project is the 4/8 part of my mini-series on social network analysis. The goal of this series is to start with the very basics of network analysis, such as with the concepts of centrality and assortativity, and progress towards more advanced topics, including Erdős-Rényi and Configuration models, as well as Exponential family random graphs. In this fourth episode, I look into the concepts of assortativity and transitivity in rural social networks. I analyze social ties of one South Indian village that was featured as village 35 in a research paper titled Social Capital and Social Quilts: Network Patterns of Favor Exchange (2012) by Matthew Jackson, Tomas Rodriguez-Barraquer, and Xu Tan. The researchers surveyed inhabitants of the village about their religion, caste and wealth (proxied by the number of rooms in their house), and also asked them who they would go to, to borrow money or to borrow food. Similarly, they asked the participants which fellow villagers would ask them for help when in need of money or food. The central question of the present project is whether the exchange of food and money happens preferentially among households from the same caste, same religion and among households with similar levels of wealth (closely tied to the concept of homophily). Or, conversely, whether people exchange money and food with people who are different than them (relating to the concept of heterophily).

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