USING NETWORK ANALYSIS to ARTICULATE the STRUCTURE of PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY by Jared Hesse a Thesis Submitted
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MEANINGFUL LINKS: USING NETWORK ANALYSIS TO ARTICULATE THE STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY by Jared Hesse A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Art in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Concentration in Psychology The Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Jupiter, Florida May, 2014 MEANINGUFL LINKS: USING NETWORK ANALYSIS TO ARTICULATE THE STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY by Jared Hesse This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Kevin Lanning, and has been approved by members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Wilkes Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ____________________________ Dr. Kevin Lanning ____________________________ Dr. John Hess ____________________________ Dean Jeffrey Buller, Wilkes Honors College _____________ Date ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Kevin Lanning for his constant encouragement and critical support while writing this thesis. He has encouraged me to push the boundaries of my research to their highest potential and to never settle for an answer that fails to satisfy the research question. Dr. John Hess has been an inspiration to my work as his unrelenting critical perspective has taught me that surface analyses of any kind are inadequate and that academic success is a product of constantly expanding one’s conceptual ideas further and further. I am also grateful for the entire psychology department at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College as they have had a tremendous positive impact on my academic career in psychology. I would also like to thank Jaclyn Goldstein, Kadeem Ricketts, and Blake Bailey for their unwavering friendships during my undergraduate stay and for serving as remarkable inspirations by cheering me on to work harder and become the best possible version of myself that I could hope to be. Lastly, I would like to thank my family for their dedication, love, and steadfast support in any endeavor that I set my mind to. iii ABSTRACT Author: Jared Hesse Title: Meaningful Links: Using Network Analysis to Articulate the Structure of Personality Psychology Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Kevin Lanning Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Concentration: Psychology Year: 2014 The current study is presented as an exploratory network analysis of personality psychology using a network composed of 54 source papers and references. The network contains 2852 distinct papers with 4455 connections between them. The articles used were papers from the Annual Review of Psychology, which dealt with the subject of personality from 1950 to 2012. References from the source papers were pulled and mapped onto a network that graphically illustrated the links between different citations. From the network it was possible to deduce, both visually and statistically, distinctively clustered communities, the relative influence of certain psychologists, and the researchers that bridged disciplinary gaps within the field of personality research. By using methods such as network analysis it is possible create an alternative map of the field of personality psychology and science as a whole. iv Table of Contents Introduction ..........................................................................................................................6 Methods..............................................................................................................................16 Results ................................................................................................................................17 Discussion ..........................................................................................................................23 Appendix ............................................................................................................................29 References ..........................................................................................................................48 v Meaningful Links: Using Network Analysis to Articulate the Structure of Personality Psychology Network analysis is an emergent method which seeks to illustrate and interpret the data in the world around us in terms of relationships between entities. With the advent of Big Data, the social sciences have exploded with research into how our interconnected lives can articulate larger ideas about society. The sheer volume of data available, in tandem with refined tools of analysis, can be used to describe higher-order societal changes which transcend the boundaries of any one academic discipline. A collection of data on individuals’ movements through airports could be tracked and visualized to understand how a pandemic spreads. Networks can use data longitudinally to express the changing shape of interpersonal relationships, country allegiances, and illustrate how various forms of contagion, social and medical, can spread through a network of individuals (Lazer et al., 2009). The value of network analysis goes beyond the pictorial depiction of the studied relationship. Questions regarding the size, density, and overall structure of networks can lead to new insights beyond often stunning visual displays. Network analysis has an extremely high degree of interdisciplinary reach and potential, and is a strong holistic approach to the questions it seeks to answer (Easley & Kleinberg, 2010; Newman, 2010). As a testament to their interdisciplinary nature, networks have been used in an assortment of venues, academic and otherwise, including: mapping the spread of pandemic diseases, creating better search results for Google, and charting the pathways of neuronal activity in the brain (Barabási, 2012). Webster, Dzedzy, & Crosier (2013) used social network analysis to examine gender differences in hiring in a sample of American Association of 6 Universities (AAU) colleges. The researchers were able to discern which universities were most pivotal in closing the gender gap in hiring as well as what hiring pictorially looks like in a network space. By analyzing the number of hiring paths that go through certain universities the researchers were able to find correlations between how “central” a university was and their productivity, prestige, and gender of professors. The process of mapping scientific disciplines has recently gained traction in the practical realm as it allows researchers to find peers with similar research interests and to see how certain scientific communities are partitioned. Analyzing citations and mapping them in a network is the base method in mapping a scientific community. Klavans & Boyack (2010) describes three methods that are classically used in citation network analysis: co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and direct citation. Co-citation analysis describes the frequency which two articles are cited by another article. If two articles are frequently cited by others they can be seen as related by their mutual citations. Bibliographic coupling refers to when two papers share a citation in common. This indicates that the two citing papers may be similar in their subject matter as they both reference the same material. Lastly, direct citation describes mapping citations as from one paper to another, only considering direct citation links and disregarding mutual citations. Direct citation is considered to be the weakest method of scientific mapping with co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling being tied for the most effective way (Klavans & Boyack, 2010). Bibliographic coupling’s effectiveness is dampened by the fact that it is a retroactive measurement of outgoing citations from source papers. Co- citation analysis accounts for this by considering incoming citations of older papers. By 7 analyzing a large citation network using both bibliographic couplings and co-citation analysis the time confounds for both can be somewhat mitigated. In bibliographic coupling, the citations in papers act as one type of connection that can form the basis of a network. If “A” cites “B” it creates a link between the two papers. If “C” cites “B”, “A” is then connected to “C” via “B”, by analyzing these citation networks, it is possible to glean new information regarding the importance and longevity of certain authors in a network of papers. Unnoticed links between researchers and disciplines may arise as a result of common citations between authors on other “sides” of the psychological field. Even a citation that is critical of another author has significance in that the citing author found the citee important enough to be criticized. Through this method of research, we can better understand how fields of psychology change over time, and we only need to look at their references. Numerous studies have already examined citation networks in scientific journals and have articulated robust metrics, such as PageRank and network centrality, for measuring the importance of a person or paper (Rahm & Thor, 2005; Ding, 2009; Radev et al., 2009). The present study seeks to use journal articles from the Annual Review of Psychology to understand how the structure of personality psychology has changed and what authors have been most important, or central, in the evolution of the field. The Annual Review