The study of interconnected relationships has a long, though frequently forgotten, history in anthropology. As the field of social network analysis has become more sophisticated, a growing mismatch has arisen between the underlying assumptions of statistical models for analyzing networks and the limitations of anthropological, field-collected network datasets that inform them. The realities of ethnographic fieldwork usually require collection of incomplete networks based on strategic sampling methods, resulting in partial networks with substantial missing data. Understanding regularities in missing data that arise both because of sampling designs and common field constraints offers great promise for understanding how statistical models are likely to fail and how we might improve their fit. This session will bring together papers on sampling, missing data, and inference for ethnographic network data in an attempt to address these persistent issues.
Hope to see you in Utrecht!