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Invited Presentations:  The Research Teams

The central presentations of the conference will be by six research teams with long-standing empirical projects involving network data.  Most focus on the role of partnership networks in HIV epidemiology, but others focus on migration and adolescent health.

The invited presentations will instead consist of a series of 2 hour sessions that focus on a single research project.  There will be no competing sessions, and there will be reasonable breaks between sessions.  Our intention is to broaden the usual focus of discussion to include the actual conduct of the research, as well as the findings.  Network analysis requires changes in sampling, questionnaire design, interviewer training, and data preparation, as well as analysis.  In many ways, the field is still quite young.  Given the variety of network survey designs, the virtual absence of training in network methods in most disciplines, and the scarcity of empirical projects to collect network data, much research methodology is learned and invented on the fly.  The aim of this conference is to record what has been learned by the teams here.

• The presentations will focus on the motivation for each project, what worked (and didn't work) in terms of survey design and data collection, and the findings that most clearly represent the insight gained from taking a network approach. We are hoping that the sessions will be fairly interactive.  The idea is to make this more of a shop session than a lecture, as the audience will be fairly sophisticated.

 
• Each team will also prepare a paper for distribution at the conference.  The collection of papers will later be assembled in an edited volume.  This will be a source book for other researchers who want to understand the motivations, methods and contributions of network analysis to the study of structured population dynamics.  We expect the primary audience for this book to be demographers, epidemiologists, network analysts, and modelers interested in the population dynamics of disease, migration, and diffusion more generally.

 

Invited Papers