Creative Networks | Mexican Immigrant Assets in Chicago

Network diagrams have been used to summarize and represent interactions among individuals and organizations since the 1930s, when Jacob Moreno introduced the approach. These diagrams, also called sociograms, represent individuals or organizations as nodes and represent a relationship as a line between two nodes. The overall patterns of interaction among a set of people can be shown visually as a set of nodes and lines that form a network. The kinds of people and organizations shown in a network diagram depend on the questions that researchers are aiming to answer.

This study is interested in Mexican immigrants in Chicagoland that participate in informal arts and the organizations that are important to immigrants’ daily lives. So the nodes in the diagrams presented here correspond to individuals and organizations. The type of interaction that is represented by a line in a network diagram can also vary. For this project, we were interested in the sharing of resources, whether those resources were information, services, monetary support, volunteers, etc. The links in these diagrams correspond to collaboration and resource exchange.

The network diagrams in this section are based on data collected from organizations and individuals using a bilingual survey developed especially for our research.

The Field Museum and the University of Illinois are sensitive to the privacy concerns of immigrants in the United States. Though we do not believe we have put any of our respondents at risk by answering this survey, no information can be linked back to individual respondents.

Some Notes on Interpreting the Diagrams:

1) In these diagrams nodes with similar patterns of relationships and strengths of ties are nearer to each other.
2) Different colors indicate men, women, and organizations.
3) Different shapes represent individuals and organizations
4) Different sizes represent a person’s involvement in the arts or an organization’s average level of collaboration. The larger the node, the greater the participation or collaboration.
5) Different line thickness represent the strength of a relationship. The thicker the line, the stronger the relationship.

Some Notes about How the Diagrams were Created:

1) Respondents and organizations are grouped according to type.
2) Organizations are placed into groups, such as church or school.
3) Individuals are grouped by gender and by their involvement in informal arts.
4) Ties among organizations are based on the average level of collaboration.
5) Ties between people and organizations are based on the average level of resources exchanged.

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