Summary¶

I am interested in homophily effects that can be derived from the social network questions in waves B, D, F, H, J, L, N, P, R of the BHPS and waves C and F of Understanding Society. Homophily with respect to occupational status is relatively constant across all waves, and age homophily only changes slightly. However, homophily with respect to gender increases sharply from the last wave of the BHPS (R) to the first wave of Understanding Society (C). Do you happen to have any ideas whether a data error (or misuse on my part) might cause such an effect?

Details and code for reproducing the observations¶

For each wave of the survey I compute the contingency table of the sex of the ego (respondent) and alter (nominated friend) and apply the Fisher exact test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_exact_test) to compute the odds ratio of association and test for statistical significance.

To account for effects of the survey design I use the weight

#xrwght

for the BHPS and

#_indscub_xw

for Understanding Society (the results are similar when omitting the survey weights). The results below include survey weights but the contingency tables have been rounded to the nearest integer. The code to reproduce the results can be found here: https://gist.github.com/tillahoffmann/e48dbc3546c418561263d181b2bda694

Thank you very much for your help!

BHPS wave: b
Contingency table
[[ 8862  3011]
 [ 2202 11176]]
Odds ratio: 14.947, p-value: 0.000000

BHPS wave: d
Contingency table
[[ 8435  2817]
 [ 2053 11044]]
Odds ratio: 16.116, p-value: 0.000000

BHPS wave: f
Contingency table
[[ 8500  3253]
 [ 2195 11149]]
Odds ratio: 13.277, p-value: 0.000000

BHPS wave: h
Contingency table
[[ 8328  3034]
 [ 1980 10994]]
Odds ratio: 15.249, p-value: 0.000000

BHPS wave: j
Contingency table
[[ 7936  2935]
 [ 1941 10541]]
Odds ratio: 14.697, p-value: 0.000000

BHPS wave: l
Contingency table
[[ 7625  2791]
 [ 1888 10157]]
Odds ratio: 14.696, p-value: 0.000000

BHPS wave: n
Contingency table
[[7320 2663]
 [1827 9780]]
Odds ratio: 14.713, p-value: 0.000000

BHPS wave: p
Contingency table
[[7099 2597]
 [1714 9436]]
Odds ratio: 15.052, p-value: 0.000000

BHPS wave: r
Contingency table
[[ 7682  2910]
 [ 1964 10312]]
Odds ratio: 13.865, p-value: 0.000000

Understanding Society wave: c
Contingency table
[[36818  9400]
 [ 6777 44476]]
Odds ratio: 25.710, p-value: 0.000000

Understanding Society wave: f
Contingency table
[[30372  7348]
 [ 5004 36279]]
Odds ratio: 29.972, p-value: 0.000000