Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Multilevel Modeling Analysis Of Dyadic Network Data With An Application To Ye’Kwana Food Sharing, Jeremy Koster, George Leckie, Andrew Miller, Raymond B. Hames

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Behavioral ecologists have recently begun using multilevel modeling for the analysis of social behavior. We present a multilevel modeling formulation of the Social Relations Model that is well suited for the analysis of dyadic network data. This model, which we adapt for count data and small datasets, can be fitted using standard multilevel modeling software packages. We illustrate this model with an analysis of meal sharing among Ye’kwana horticulturalists in Venezuela. In this setting, meal sharing among households is predicted by an association index, which reflects the amount of time that members of the households are interacting. This result replicates …