English

Identifying opinion-based groups from survey data: a bipartite network approach

Social and Information Networks 2020-12-22 v1 Physics and Society

Abstract

A survey can be represented by a bipartite network as it has two types of nodes, participants and items in which participants can only interact with items. We introduce an agreement threshold to take a minimal projection of the participants linked by shared responses in order to identify opinion-based groups. We show that in American National Election Studies-data, this can identify polarisation along political attitudes. We also take a projection of attitudes that are linked by how participants respond to them. This can be used to show which attitudes are commonly held together in different countries or communities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.11392,
  title  = {Identifying opinion-based groups from survey data: a bipartite network approach},
  author = {Pádraig MacCarron and Paul J. Maher and Michael Quayle},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.11392},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

11 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T21:08:09.786Z