Analysis of opinion evolution in a multi-cultural student social network

The spread of opinions in social networks is dependent on structural properties of the network and the individual characteristics of its nodes. To capture this dependence, several abstract models of such spread were proposed. First, we model the difference between the dynamics of opinion spread in communities with a static social network versus a dynamic social network. Here we use the theoretical model of spread of opinions called the Binary Agreement Model based on the naming game. Using this model, we study potential mechanisms for the dependencies observed in the data by matching model generated evolution of opinion with the empirically observed evolution in the data. Second, we examine the unique set of behavioral network data (based on electronic logs of dyadic contact via smartphones) collected at the University of Notre Dame. The participants are a sample of members of the entering class of freshmen in the fall of 2011 whose opinions on a wide variety of political and social issues have been regularly recorded-at the beginning and end of each semester-for the last three years. Using this data set, we measure the evolution of participants' opinions and ascertain how much this evolution depends on the cultural traits of individuals and the structural properties of social networks that they form. Our analysis of our empirical dataset shows that ties among people who are more likely to share opinions (e.g. same race, gender, or socioeconomic class) decay at a slower rate than ties among persons who are likely to have different opinions. The analysis also indicates that the partner selection of individuals is associated sharing a (political) opinion. These results offer an assessment of the level of impact of culture and social network dynamics on the evolution of opinions in multi-cultural social networks. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.