Summary

Animal social networks are descriptions of social structure which, aside from their intrinsic interest for understanding sociality, can have significant bearing across many fields of biology.


Network analysis provides a flexible toolbox for testing a broad range of hypotheses, and for describing the social system of species or populations in a quantitative and comparable manner. However, it requires careful consideration of underlying assumptions, in particular differentiating real from observed networks and controlling for inherent biases that are common in social data.


We provide a practical guide for using this framework to analyse animal social systems and test hypotheses. First, we discuss key considerations when defining nodes and edges, and when designing methods for collecting data. We discuss different approaches for inferring social networks from these data and displaying them. We then provide an overview of methods for quantifying properties of nodes and networks, as well as for testing hypotheses concerning network structure and network processes. Finally, we provide information about assessing the power and accuracy of an observed network.


Alongside this manuscript, we provide appendices containing background information on common programming routines and worked examples of how to perform network analysis using the r programming language.


We conclude by discussing some of the major current challenges in social network analysis and interesting future directions. In particular, we highlight the under-exploited potential of experimental manipulations on social networks to address research questions.

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Constructing, conducting and interpreting animal social network analysis

https://web.science.uu.nl/behaviour/deVries/DeVries1995.pdf

An improved test of linearity in dominance hierarchies containing unknown or tied relationships

Finding a dominance order most consistent with a linear hierarchy : a new procedure and review

Techniques for Analyzing Vertebrate Social Structure Using Identified Individuals: Review and Recommendations

The complex cooperative behavior exhibited by wild chimpanzees generates considerable theoretical and empirical interest, yet we know very little about the mechanisms responsible for its evolution. Here, we investigate the influence of kinship on the cooperative behavior of male chimpanzees living in an unusually large community at Ngogo in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Using long-term field observations and molecular genetic techniques to identify kin relations between individuals, we show that male chimpanzees clearly prefer to affiliate and cooperate with their maternal brothers in several behavioral contexts. Despite these results, additional analyses reveal that the impact of kinship is limited; paternal brothers do not selectively affiliate and cooperate, probably because they cannot be reliably recognized, and the majority of highly affiliative and cooperative dyads are actually unrelated or distantly related. These findings add to a growing body of research that indicates that animals cooperate with each other to obtain both direct and indirect fitness benefits and that complex cooperation can occur between kin and nonkin alike.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/104/19/7786.full.pdf

The limited impact of kinship on cooperation in wild chimpanzees

MatMan is a program for performing a variety of ethological analyses of frequency (interaction) matrices and transition matrices. These analyses include linear hierarchy indices for dominance matrices (APPLEBY, 1983), reorganization of a dominance matrix such that the subjects are in rank order, matrix correlation methods such as Mantel's test (MANTEL, 1967) and rowwise matrix correlation (DE VRIES, 1993), methods based on information theory (STEINBERG, 1977), and the calculation of expected and residual values in transition matrices with defined or undefined diagonal. In addition, MatMan offers some useful options for manipulating matrices. Import of matrices from The Observer (NOLDUS, 1991) and SAS is, within certain limitations, possible. Export of matrices is possible to the programs CORAN (1985), Vegrow (FRESCO, 1989), NCSS (HINTZE, 1987), SAS and SPSSPC.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/4535109

Peter L.H. Hanegraaf

Papers

Matman : a program for the analysis of sociometric matrices and behavioural transition matrices

SA12 A Mixed-Methods Review of the Systematic Reviewer's Inter-Reviewer Reliability Using the Kappa Statistic