DieTryin: An R package for data collection, automated data entry, and post-processing of network-structured economic games, social networks, and other roster-based dyadic data

Automatic entry and coding of social networks and dyadic peer ratings

In small-scale communities, social-scientists can use photo-rosters to collect social network and dyadic peer-ratings data. In past work, we introduced an R package to automate photo-standardization, survey construction, and data-entry. This R package, however, lacked two key features required for fully-unsupervised data-entry. First, respondent IDs needed to be manually linked to cellphone photographs of the photo-roster before DieTryin could process the data; second, users needed to identify the locations of the photo-roster in each cellphone photograph using a point-and-click interface. To address the first shortcoming, we introduce a new Android application, DieTryinCam, which facilitates annotation of cell-phone photographs with respondent, question, and panel IDs. To address the second shortcoming, we add new functionality to the DieTryin R package, which allows for the precise location of the photograph roster to be automatically identified. Automated data entry in DieTryin now requires no user input beyond a single function call from R.

Social hierarchies and social networks in humans

Across species, social hierarchies are often governed by dominance relations. In humans, where there are multiple culturally valued axes of distinction, social hierarchies can take a variety of forms and need not rest on dominance relations. Consequently, humans navigate multiple domains of status, i.e. relative standing. Importantly, while these hierarchies may be constructed from dyadic interactions, they are often more fundamentally guided by subjective peer evaluations and group perceptions. Researchers have typically focused on the distinct elements that shape individuals' relative standing, with some emphasizing individual-level attributes and others outlining emergent macro-level structural outcomes. Here, we synthesize work across the social sciences to suggest that the dynamic interplay between individual-level and meso-level properties of the social networks in which individuals are embedded are crucial for understanding the diverse processes of status differentiation across groups. More specifically, we observe that humans not only navigate multiple social hierarchies at any given time but also simultaneously operate within multiple, overlapping social networks. There are important dynamic feedbacks between social hierarchies and the characteristics of social networks, as the types of social relationships, their structural properties, and the relative position of individuals within them both influence and are influenced by status differentiation. This article is part of the theme issue 'The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies'.