Izabel P Aguiar

Aguiar, I., Chodrow, P.S., & Ugander, J. (2025). The illusion of households as entities in social networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14764

In many studies of social connections in communities, towns, or villages, social networks are typically collected and analyzed at one of two representational levels: individual or household. There is therefore an important choice to be made in any study of such a social network: should the nodes represent individuals or households, and how should the relationships between the nodes be represented? In this work we focus on interrogating this commonly made—but under-examined—methodological choice in social network analysis.

We contribute a bridging of insights, tools, and observations from disparate fields in an effort to systematize recommendations for guiding the choice of which network to study. We explore how quantitative analysis—and the corresponding conclusions about a social network—considerably differs between the individual and household networks. By incorporating work from a broad range of disciplines, we aim to help researchers make a rigorous decision for how to align their research question with an appropriate social network so that their subsequent analyses may be consistent with their research goals.