Attiro

Description

The Attiro dataset

Background

In 1948, American sociologists executed a large
field study in the Turrialba region, which is a
rural area in Costa Rica (Latin America). They
were interested in the impact of formal and informal
social systems on social change. Among other things,
they investigated visiting relations between families
living in haciendas (farms) in a neighborhood called
Attiro. The network of visiting ties is a simple
directed graph: each arc represents "frequent visits"
from one family to another. The exact number of visits
was not recorded. Line values classify the visiting
relation as ordinary (value one), visits among kin
(value two), and visits among ritual kin, i.e.,
between god-parent and god-child.

The investigators proposed an ethnographic classification of the families into six family-friendship groupings on substantive criteria. In rural areas where there is little opportunity to move up and down the social ladder social groups are usually based on family relations.

Similar data are available for another village in the same area: San Juan Sur. In addition, for San Juan Sur, a network is available with the arcs representing the answers of the (head of) families to the question: "In case of a death in the family, whom would you notify first?". In this file (SanJuanSur_deathmessage.net), the coordinates of families correspond with the locations of families in the original sociogram drawn by the researchers.

References

• Charles P. Loomis, Julio O. Morales, Roy A. Clifford & Olen E. Leonard, Turrialba. Social Systems and the Introduction of Change (Glencoe (Ill.): The Free Press, 1953): p. 43 (Attiro), 45 and 78 (San Juan Sur).
• W. de Nooy, A. Mrvar, & V. Batagelj, Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 3.

History

• Original author: Charles Price Loomis (1905-1995).
• Data collected and translated into Pajek data files by W. de Nooy, 2001 (San Juan) and 2003 (Attiro).