Metrics for dominance interactions: introduction

Many interactions between group-living individuals can be influenced by hierarchies that exist between the interactors. These interactions can be measured in lots of different ways, and once measured, whatever has been scored needs to be processed to give a reproducible estimate of the shape of these interactions.

What this means in practice if you’re starting a new project with a new study organism is that you spend a lot of time thinking about what behaviours to record, and how to record them, but don’t really give consideration to the means of crunching these numbers down to something meaningful at the end. Good experimental design implies that the analysis has been considered during the design of the experiment, but this intermediate stage of generating ‘raw’ information about any hierarchies that are in place may be left out, meaning that something has to be cobbled together post hoc after the work has been done. This is never ideal!

Having supervised a fair number of projects where exactly this has been done, I’ve decided to try and get my head around the various statistics out there that are designed for assessing and ranking hierarchies. Some of these are fairly straightforward, and some are slightly more involved, dipping into social network analysis and other emerging fields in animal behaviour. To make this a useful exercise, I’ll attempt to put together a how-to guide for using them, aimed at researchers with a mixed range of skills in manipulating numbers, and where time permits, I’ll try and add in some practice examples. How well this works depends upon both my own understanding, the time I have available, and the limitations of inputting maths into a WordPress blog!

What I won’t be doing (at least, initially) is being particularly critical about which techniques work best: this is a voyage of discovery for me too! I also won’t be focussing on what dominance is for, why it exists, and how it does or doesn’t drive particular group behaviours (but I do discuss how leadership decisions don’t necessarily depend upon the hierarchy present in Rands et al. 2008 and Rands 2011). This series of blog postings will take a little time to put together (An index page will give detailed links to other metrics within this blog), so if you’re looking for general advice on the sort of indices that are out there, I strongly recommend hunting down a copy of the excellent book by Hal Whitehead (pages 186-195 in particular).

Further reading

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