Analysis of the Southern women network using fractional approach

The Davis' Southern women network is one of the most analyzed two-mode networks in the SNA literature. Freeman published in 2003 a meta-analysis in which he reviewed 21 clusterings of the set of women obtained by different approaches. Some solutions are based on the projection to a one-mode network. In the projection, the nodes from the other mode with a large degree are over-represented. In this paper, another approach is presented based on fractional weighting used in bibliometrics that provides a fairer weighting of nodes on either mode. The obtained projection networks are difficult to read. To get insight into their structure and to identify groups of nodes the Pathfinder method and hierarchical clustering are used. Three regular two-mode blockmodels of the Southern women network are obtained congruent with Davis' second matrix arrangement.

Automated summary

The study conducted a detailed clustering analysis of the Davis' Southern women network, proposed a new projection method based on fractional weighting to achieve fairer node weights, and used Pathfinder and hierarchical clustering methods to gain insight into the network's structure and identify node groups.