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Deconstructing Diffusion

An Ethnostatistical Examination of Medical Innovation Network Data Reanalyses

University of Texas at Austin

Hongseok Oh

Yonsei University

Four published reanalyses of part of the celebrated medical innovation data focus on network effects on the diffusion of tetracycline. Each reanalysis rejects the findings of the previous analysis. This article shows that in the early 1950s, when the original data were collected, private practice physicians, swamped by demand, but facing threats to their autonomy from the federal government and from university medical centers, struggled to keep up with new therapies and relied on colleagues and friends within the profession for help and advice. This article examines the reanalyses' judgment calls concerning the use of a psychophysics power function, the employment of a time-sensitive model, the imputation and exclusion of data, and the addition of new variables. Given the radical undecidability of numerical evidence in the absence of context, the reanalysis of stand-alone data is likely to produce a continuing series of conflicting results.

Key Words: medical diffusion • social networks • structural equivalence • cohesion

Organizational Research Methods, Vol. 9, No. 4, 432-455 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1094428106290783


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