physician_trust — Physician trust network (1966)

Description

Advice, discussion and friendship ties among 246 physicians in four towns in Illinois (Peoria, Bloomington, Quincy and Galesburg), from the study of the diffusion of a medical innovation (the adoption of the new drug tetracycline) by J. Coleman, E. Katz and H. Menzel. The data set was prepared by R. S. Burt from the data collected by Coleman, Katz and Menzel, reported in their 1966 book. Three sociometric relations were obtained from the replies to the questions: "When you need information or advice about questions of therapy where do you usually turn?" (advice); "And who are the three or four physicians with whom you most often find yourself discussing cases or therapy in the course of an ordinary week -- last week for instance?" (discussion); and "Would you tell me the first names of your three friends whom you see most often socially?" (friendship). In addition, records of prescriptions were reviewed and many other questions were asked, of which 13 items are included as node attributes. The data were distributed by L. C. Freeman on his network data page at the University of California, Irvine (no longer online), from which this version was obtained via the Internet Archive.

A directed edge (i, j) indicates that physician i named physician j in reply to at least one of the three questions. There are no ties between physicians of different towns. Five physicians neither named nor were named by anyone, and are isolated nodes. A different preparation of the Galesburg part of the same study (31 physicians, with friendship and discussion ties, from Knoke and Burt 1983) is in the entry galesburg_physicians; here, Galesburg has 35 physicians, with 86 friendship ties (78 there).

The network has the following properties:

Nodes (in all coded attributes except adoption_date, 9 means no answer):
- city, the town of practice.
- adoption_date, the month in which the physician first prescribed tetracycline, according to the prescription records (1 to 14: the months from November 1953 to December 1954, in order, so that 9 is July 1954; 15: December 1954/January 1955, 16: January/February 1955, 17: February 1955, 18: no prescriptions found, 98: no prescription data obtained; the value 99, which occurs for 30 physicians, is not documented).
- career_start, the year in which the physician started in the profession (1: 1919 or before, 2: 1920–1929, 3: 1930–1934, 4: 1935–1939, 5: 1940–1944, 6: 1945 or later).
- meetings, attendance at national, regional or state conventions of professional societies during the last 12 months (0: none, 1: only general meetings, 2: specialty meetings).
- journals, the number of medical journals received regularly (1: two, 2: three, ..., 8: nine or more).
- free_time, with whom the physician spends more free time (1: non-doctors, 2: about evenly split, 3: doctors).
- discuss, whether the physician likes to talk about medical matters when with other doctors socially (1: no, 2: yes, 3: does not care).
- clubs, membership in a club or hobby composed mostly of doctors (0: no, 1: yes).
- friends, how many of the three friends seen most often socially are doctors (1: none, 2: one, 3: two, 4: three).
- community, how long the physician has been practicing in the community (1: a year or less, 2: one to two years, 3: two to five years, 4: five to ten years, 5: ten to twenty years, 6: more than twenty years; the value 8, which occurs for one physician, is not documented).
- patients, the number of office visits in an average week (1: 25 or less, 2: 26–50, 3: 51–75, 4: 76–100, 5: 101–150, 6: 151 or more).
- proximity, whether there are other physicians in the same building (1: none in the building, 2: some in the building, but none sharing the office or waiting room, 3: some sharing the office or waiting room, 4: some perhaps sharing the office or waiting room).
- specialty, the medical specialty (1: general practitioner, 2: internist, 3: pediatrician, 4: other specialty).
Edges: advice, discussion and friendship, whether i named j in reply to the corresponding question.

Tags

Social Offline Unweighted Metadata Multilayer

Citation

J. Coleman, E. Katz, & H. Menzel, "The diffusion of an innovation among physicians." Sociometry, 20(4), 253-270. (1957) 10.2307/2785979 Sci-Hub
J. S. Coleman, E. Katz, H. Menzel, "Medical Innovation: A Diffusion Study." Bobbs-Merrill, New York (1966) scholar.google.com
R. S. Burt, "Social contagion and innovation: Cohesion versus structural equivalence." American Journal of Sociology 92(6), 1287-1335 (1987) 10.1086/228667 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115130726/http://moreno.ss.uci.edu/data.html#ckm

Networks

Tip: hover over a column header for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$c$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
physician_trust	241	1,098	4.56	4.88	8.88	3.58	-0.01	0.27	5	0.49	Directed	Unipartite			6 KiB	9 KiB	9 KiB	7 KiB

Ridiculograms^*

^* These are automatically generated force-directed visualizations, and can be quite meaningless for networks both big and small. They should not be taken seriously as sources of scientific insight. See here for a discussion.