Communication and Social Networks (Spring 2020)/Dutch School Data Visualization challenge

The goal

In 2003 and 2004, researchers repeatedly surveyed a number of Dutch school students about their friendships and their behavior. They were particularly interested in the relationship between friendships and drinking behavior.

However, there are lots of different questions that you can ask about this data, and lots of different ways to visualize relationships between them. Your goal is to identify a question that you think would be interesting and to use R to visualize the network in a way that sheds light on that question.

The data

Right-click this link and open it in RStudio. At the top of RStudio click "knit", and it should open up something that looks kind of like a web page, which was created from this file (video explaining R Markdown). It includes example code for making network visualizations, and also includes code for loading the data for this assignment.

The researchers made their data available in files that are difficult to get into R. In order to make things easier, I've changed this messy data of multiple matrices into an igraph object for you. You can see how I did that here. The key piece of code that you will need in your code is load(url('https://github.com/jdfoote/Communication-and-Social-Networks/raw/master/activities/school_graph.Rdata')). This should grab the igraph objects G and friend_net, and load them into your environment. Descriptions of both networks is in the R Markdown file.

Descriptions of what each measure means are at the this site, maintained by the people who collected the data.

Basically, it includes information about alcohol use, gender, age, ethnicity (whether Dutch or not), and religion.