Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/chains.htm

by chaostheory • 16 years ago

143 56 16 years ago

researchnews.osu.edu

sounddust• 16 years ago

(2004)

andreyf• 16 years ago

That, and the picture says everything a lot more succinctly than words: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/chainspix.htm

mahmud2• 16 years ago

Where is the geek independent set? G = (V, empty)

xyzzyz5• 16 years ago

Can someone explain to me why I do not see isolated vertices in this graph? When I was in (Central Europe) high school, I recall that apart from me, there was considerable amount of people not involved in any kind of relationships, and even not counting them, many people used to have partners from other schools. Is it really like this in American high schools, or did the researchers just choose this way of presenting the results?

a-priori2• 16 years ago

I believe they omitted students who did not have sexual relationships.

jcromartie• 16 years ago

The article states that just over half were sexually active. So they must not be including celibate students.

xyzzyz5• 16 years ago

I meant the graph linked in the adjacent comment: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/chainspix.htm The description states that it presents romantic connections, not the sexual ones. However, rereading the article makes me think that they did not take single students into account when creating this graph.

transphenomenal• 16 years ago

The article said it was in a small town where the second nearest high school would be more than an hour away. Therefore the only 'legal' relationship they could have with people close enough were in Jefferson High School.

xyzzyz5• 16 years ago

Oh, thank you, I must have missed it.

jseliger• 16 years ago

"many people used to have partners from other schools."

One thing the researchers noted is that they chose a large-ish but relatively isolated community with a single high school that's about an hour from a major city. This means that geography dictates that students are relatively unlikely to date people from other high schools.

dagw• 16 years ago

Some pretty interesting patterns there. One of the more interesting was that people who have had lots (5 or more) partners had tended towards 'unpopular' partners (zero or 1 other partners).

Also I wonder if 2 homosexual relationships (that I can see) is in any way accurate or due to embarrassment to admit such a thing even on an anonymous survey.

xyzzyz5• 16 years ago

Though I do not have any statistics and I am not familiar with American high school culture, I believe that not many homosexuals are romantically/sexually active in high school. People in this age are still discovering these things, and I don't think that most of the homosexuals fully realize what their orientation is like. Even if they do, actively seeking partner is looking for trouble in high school reality -- children and teenagers are so cruel towards people different from them. I did not know of any of my school acquaintances to be homosexual, and the possibility of all of them being straight is kind of odd, considering the percentage of homosexuals in society.

j_baker• 16 years ago

"Though I do not have any statistics and I am not familiar with American high school culture, I believe that not many homosexuals are romantically/sexually active in high school. People in this age are still discovering these things, and I don't think that most of the homosexuals fully realize what their orientation is like."

Two things:

1. Yes they are sexually active. They just have to be more discrete.

2. You don't "discover" that you're gay any more than you "discover" that you're straight, and if it does happen it happens before high school. I can think of things going back to third grade that pointed towards me being gay. Now, whether people choose to accept their sexual orientation is a different matter.

jhuckestein• 16 years ago

That first observation is really interesting!

I think the homosexual numbers are accurate, at least for the guys. The gay high school students I knew seemed to be more actively engaged with older men.

kd0amg• 16 years ago

One of the more interesting was that people who have had lots (5 or more) partners had tended towards 'unpopular' partners (zero or 1 other partners).

It looks like most of the vertices here have degree 1 or 2. Do those adjacent to vertices with degree 5+ actually tend more towards low degree than the rest of the population? (I haven't gone through and counted, but I'm skeptical)

leif• 16 years ago

I agree, there doesn't seem to be a degree bias when you compare partners of high-degree vertices to the rest of the population.

philwelch• 16 years ago

Of the 2 homosexual relationships, one of them is in a triangle with a heterosexual partner. That may be more of a threesome than a purely homosexual relationship.

One interesting pattern that I saw was that, other than the threesome, there only seem to be four cycles--one is extremely long and the other three all involve the same guy who is of degree 9 and serves as a cut vertex to no less than seven subgraphs.

a-priori2• 16 years ago

Teenagers have sex. Who knew.

The interesting part to me is that if you look at individual students in the big group, most have only 1-3 relationships. They just so happen to link up into a massive web.

purosercarnal• 16 years ago

As I studied in a male only institution, we used to rush to the the girls high school, it was a five minutes walk. Weekends were devoted to establishing new connections (trying to), we were struggling to find partners, specially when approaching Christmas. Good old time. I imagine studying in a mixed sex high school should be better to get more relations, but is not so clear. We strive to do it our way.

dmd• 16 years ago

I made a sex graph for my social group several years ago (names blocked out). http://bit.ly/bHPjN4

It was enlightening for everyone.

mahmud2• 16 years ago

Damn, that square with seven edges is no "square" at all. He/she slept with half your friends of the opposite sex!

jancona• 16 years ago

Reminded me of http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtube_gdata_player...

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

What a pity they didn't add the question 'do you practice safe sex' and colored the dots accordingly.

It would be of far more educational value to the group that was studied and all their peers.

Side note: In the US there are about 750,000 teen pregnancies annually.

rbanffy3• 16 years ago

> 750,000 teen pregnancies annually

These days, getting pregnant is one of the nicest things that can happen. At least it's neither fatal nor contagious...

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

~80% of teenage pregnancies are 'unwanted'.

brianto2010• 16 years ago

That was not the point of the study. The point of the study was to examine the relational map within the high school. It was not to examine sexual hygiene of students in the school.

> "It would be of far more educational value to the group that was studied and all their peers."

How is that so?

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

> That was not the point of the study.

I realize that.

> The point of the study was to examine the relational map within the high school. It was not to examine sexual hygiene of students in the school.

No disagreement there.

>> "It would be of far more educational value to the group that was studied and all their peers." > How is that so?

Because it would show them in a fairly easy to understand graph how STDs spread through such a network.

Having the 'outside world' connected wouldn't hurt either.

Anon84• 16 years ago

The actual article mentioned in the link: http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/stovel/Chains.pdf

See also: "The web of human sexual contacts" http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v411/n6840/full/411907a...

(Non pay-wall version: http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0106507 )

mhb• 16 years ago

I don't see a better way to do it, but what would make them think that results based on asking teenagers who they are having sex with would be reliable/actionable? This isn't even addressed in the article?

felixc• 16 years ago

That's probably because this is a press release/internal news item, not the research paper itself.

That said, I have no idea if they discuss that in the paper either.

sesqu2• 16 years ago

I wonder how they handled the case where X claims relationship with Y, but Y doesn't agree.

I once amused myself for a few minutes by dreaming up an app for Facebook that would let you claim a relationship with someone and send that person a message allowing them to confirm. It would then collect statistics like false claims, and potentially produce graphs like the one in this article about your social circle.

kingkawn• 16 years ago

are there high rates of STD infection for teens? or is it more prevalent in adults with the mentioned hub networks?

joshuacc• 16 years ago

"breaking one link in the chain – any link - will stop that part of the network from spreading any further"

Interesting. I wonder whether the "save sex till marriage" movement is having much of an impact in slowing the spread of STDs.

My impression is that they don't change many teenagers' behavior in the long run. But for this specific effect they wouldn't have to change more than a few to have a big impact.

sprout• 16 years ago

A handful of condoms would have the same effect, and even more people might use them.

sesqu2• 16 years ago

I'd be careful with inferences like that. It's not a directed graph, so talking about flow in time is very speculative.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

And it does not document promiscuity either (in time), for all we know these are nicely serialized or it could be one big orgy.

It also keeps the relationships within the school, which is not a realistic picture whatsoever, and once you add in the outside world (especially to that larger chunk of the graphic) all bets are off.

rbanffy3• 16 years ago

Am I the only one who looked at the diagram and imagined it as a great party planning tool?

Couldn't something like this be quickly built with a school-wide hot-or-not website? People publish far worse stuff on Facebook.

Hmm... Orkut has a network like this, in the form of crush-lists. In fact, I know two couples who were "aided" by this feature.

gcanyon• 16 years ago

This article is from several years ago. When I read it then the thing that stood out to me is that the graph doesn't display the timing of the sexual relationships. So to say that someone who had sex with just one person is exposed to everyone in the graph is silly, because that relationship might have happened when both were virgins, and hence no such exposure happened.

I sent an email to James Moody pointing out this obvious flaw in the conclusions, and he responded saying that he agreed. His original work was not intended to show the chronology, and the article draws conclusions that he didn't claim.

mattmaroon2• 16 years ago

Does it matter? Wherever there is a link, (IE persons A and B both slept with person C) there was an exposure. Unless they were simultaneous, in which case I went to the wrong high school.

ryanpetrich• 16 years ago

In your example: if person A slept with person C before B did then B has an exposure to A, but A has no exposure to B.

StavrosK• 16 years ago

Are you saying you can get infected retroactively, when one of your past lovers gets infected? That's harsh.

pbiggar• 16 years ago

I think the problem is that he is describing the graph as if it is undirected, when for the purposed of STDs, it should be directed.

dasil0032• 16 years ago

I don't see how direction solves the problem. Wouldn't you need a weighted graph to encode the timeline?

tptacek2• 16 years ago

Obligatory:

http://sexchart.org/sexchart.9.15

(This charts the relationships of the informal collection of people from #hack, #phreak, and god knows what other EFNet "underground" channels).

A smart guy we hired wrote a traceroute for this (including an FSM parser for the ASCII art); in an attempt to one-up that, I wrote one that did all-points shortest path and could answer questions like "how many hops am I from X if you take Y out of the picture". We used it to test our routing code at Sonicity; it was handy.

Jun8• 16 years ago

Ahh, too bad I can't upvote you a 100 points. Words fail me when confronted with this chart. I'm taking up the challenge to parse the ASCII art to convert to Graphviz as my next project.

tptacek2• 16 years ago

Just scan it looking for the first in a run of alnum characters, build a table of nodes, and then scan the perimeter of each node looking for a character that starts an edge (`'|- etc). Then write a little state machine for following each edge, and build an adjacency list.

I really ought to use this thing for C class.

there• 16 years ago

where's tqbf?

dasil0032• 16 years ago

Oh man, I think I see the nick of a high school girlfriend on there with a disreputable number. Thankfully that relationship predates the chart.

mkelly• 16 years ago

If they're describing the Moody paper I'm thinking of, this is _Chains of Affection_.

Here's a link (PDF!): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.131...

dennisgorelik• 16 years ago

How do they know that the data they collected in their interviews is reliable?

Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School

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