Many questions in social research must be evaluated over time. For example, in studies of intragenerational mobility, measuring opportunity for economic advancement requires longitudinal data. The authors develop and use a class of hybrid functional models to demonstrate how different models can...

The spread of a disease through human populations can be significantly altered by patterned networks of social contact. Largely in response to AIDS, the way in which social networks channel disease has recently become the focus of a sustained modeling effort in epidemiology. The challenge has...

Social scientists are increasingly interested in techniques for comparing changes in distributional shape in addition to mean levels. One such technique is based on the relative distribution, a nonparametric summary of the information required for scale-invariant comparisons between two...