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Mathew
We asked teachers to identify leaders and construct workgroups as 1 of 3
conditions in a randomized controlled trial testing the effectiveness of
a tobacco prevention program. Our expectation was that this condition
would not perform as well as student nominations of leaders and
construction of groups based on sociometric distance. At the 1 year
follow up it performed the best in 1 curriculum (the group based or
culturally tailored one compared to a standard social influences one)
compared to groups constructed randomly (with leaders of those groups
being those with highest in degree). The citations:

Valente, T. W., Hoffman, B. R., Ritt-Olson, A., Lichtman, K., & Johnson,
C. A. (2003). The effects of a social network method for group
assignment strategies on peer led tobacco prevention programs in
schools. American Journal of Public Health, 93, 1837-1843.

Valente, T.W., Unger, J., Ritt-Olson, A., Cen, S. Y. & Johnson, A. C.
(2006). The interaction of curriculum and implementation method on 1
year smoking outcomes. Health Education Research: Theory & Practice,
21, 315-324.

We collected data on teacher assignment in all 3 collections since the
study was blind to them.

- Tom

Matthew Pittinsky wrote:

>***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****
>
>Hello,
>
>A colleague and I are working on a paper that addresses the accuracy with
>which teachers perceive the student friendship patterns in their classrooms
>(degree of accuracy and sources of variation). An education example of
>Krackhardt's (1987) work on "cognitive social structures," in the sense that
>teachers are important classroom actors who engage in a wide variety of
>consequential decisions and actions that are likely influenced by their
>perceptions of who is friends with whom in the classroom (e.g. seating and
>workgroup assignments, spillover in negative/positive sentiment).
>
>We have a nice set of data to do some exploratory work on teacher accuracy
>at the network, clique, student pair, and individual student levels.
>
>My question is this: has anyone come across studies of the accuracy or
>consequences of teacher perceptions of classroom friendship patterns? We
>are familiar with a series of studies conducted in the 1940's and 50's on
>teacher accuracy perceiving student sociometric status (e.g. Bonney, 1943,
>1947; Gage, Leavitt & Stone, 1955; Gronlund, 1951, 1955, 1956). Moreno
>(1934) considered the issue in his first use of a sociometric instrument (I
>think). We also are familiar with studies by Cairns, Gest and their
>colleagues on social cognitive maps which address student perceptions of
>classroom friendship patterns. But we can't seem to find any work on the
>teacher side of things since the late 1950s. We suspect studies exist and
>we're just missing them.
>
>Any suggestions would be appreciated!
>
>Thanks in advance...
>
>Matthew Pittinsky
>Teachers College, Columbia University
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>
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--
Evaluating Health Promotion Programs (Oxford U. Press):
http://www.oup-usa.org/isbn/0195141768.html

My personal webpage:
http://www-hsc.usc.edu/~tvalente/

The Empirical Networks Project
http://ipr1.hsc.usc.edu/networks/

---
Thomas W. Valente, PhD
Director, Master of Public Health Program
http://www.usc.edu/medicine/mph/
Department of Preventive Medicine
School of Medicine
University of Southern California
1000 S. Fremont Ave.
Building A Room 5133
Alhambra CA 91803
phone: (626) 457-6678
fax: (626) 457-6699
email: [log in to unmask]



_____________________________________________________________________
SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social
network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send
an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line
UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.