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Matthew,

Both are great questions. Vis-a-vis the first, about knowledge of a
person's network, you might look at

Friedkin, Noah E. 1983. "Horizons of Observability and Limits of
Informal Control in Organizations." Social Forces 62:54-77.

Friedkin is concerned with behavior monitoring rather than knowledge of
networks, but his conclusion, that people have scant knowledge of the
doings of those at any remove from them, has implications for you.

In terms of your second question about the relationship between networks
and attributes, I recommend

Watts, Duncan J., Peter Sheridan Dodds, and Mark Newmann. 2002.
"Identity and Search in Social Networks." Science 296:1303-05.

Watts et al. are concerned with how people can make use of small world
connectivity based on knowledge of the presumed distribution of attributes.

DRG

Matthew Dombroski wrote:

> *****  To join INSNA, visit http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/  *****
>
> Colleagues,
> I'm working on some research that evaluates how knowledge of a person's
> social network decreases with increased path lengths between individuals.
> Does anyone know of any work that is being done in this area or any
> references that might help?
>
> A similar question that I'm looking at regards homophily. A clique of
> individuals within a social network might be strongly related to each
> other. But as we move to the fringes of that clique, individuals on the
> periphery might share less in common with those who are central in the
> clique. If we leave the clique and move to another one, we might find
> that
> individuals in the new clique are not related at all to the individuals
> from the first clique, or they share very few common attributes. Has
> anyone
> attempted to quantify these properties and are there references out there
> on it? Thanks, Matt
>
> ________________________________________
> Matthew J. Dombroski, PhD Student
>
> Carnegie Mellon Univerisity
> Dept. of Engineering and Public Policy
> Computational Analysis of Social and
>        Organizational Systems
>
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