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H. Russell Bernard
Harvey Russell Bernard (born 1940) is an American anthropologist and social scientist, known for his research on social network analysis, for his use of computers to preserve the cultural history of vanishing languages, and for his work on training young anthropologists. Bernard, who is director of ASU's Institute for Social Science Research, is also a professor emeritus of anthropology of the University of Florida.
H. Russell Bernard, born in New York City on June 12, 1940, majored in anthropology and sociology at New York's Queens College, earning a BA in 1961.
He earned an MA in linguistic anthropology from University of Illinois in 1963, doing work that he later said shaped much of his career.
He then continued at the University of Illinois, doing graduate work in the area of quantitative data analysis with his thesis adviser Edward Bruner, getting his Ph.D. in 1968.
Bernard's anthropology career after leaving the University of Illinois included work at Washington State University and at West Virginia University. The University of Florida anthropology department recruited him as a full professor and department chair in 1979. In 2015, ASU hired Bernard to direct its Institute for Social Science Research.
Bernard (together with oceanographer Peter Killworth whom he met in 1972 while both were working at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography) designed the "reverse small world" experiment (1978). This took an approach different from Stanley Milgram's "small-world" research, which had been done in the 1960's. Where Milgram had studied the network-distance between two random people (Six degrees of separation), Bernard and Killworth instead asked people to name a person whom they would first approach if they were starting to reach out to contact an unknown person.
Bernard and Killworth also developed the "network scale-up method" (NSUM), a new and inexpensive way to estimate the size of hard-to-count populations. Its original use was to estimate the number of people who had been killed by a recent earthquake. By asking each respondent a number of questions in the form "How many X's do you know?", they were able to use data from populations whose size they knew (doctors, people over 80, etc.) to scale-up from the number of earthquake victims known to each respondent to the probable number of earthquake victims in a population.
Their NSUM mathematical model has also been used to improve calculation of the size of a person's social network. The 1990's Dunbar's number theorem had estimated people's average social network size was about 150. The Bernard-Killworth number was about 290. A survey paper "Thirty Years of The Network Scale-up Method" published in 2021 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association reported that network scale-up methods still needed more improvement but, having "been used in a large number of real-world studies..have offered promising results in the field of size estimation."
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H. Russell Bernard
Harvey Russell Bernard (born 1940) is an American anthropologist and social scientist, known for his research on social network analysis, for his use of computers to preserve the cultural history of vanishing languages, and for his work on training young anthropologists. Bernard, who is director of ASU's Institute for Social Science Research, is also a professor emeritus of anthropology of the University of Florida.
H. Russell Bernard, born in New York City on June 12, 1940, majored in anthropology and sociology at New York's Queens College, earning a BA in 1961.
He earned an MA in linguistic anthropology from University of Illinois in 1963, doing work that he later said shaped much of his career.
He then continued at the University of Illinois, doing graduate work in the area of quantitative data analysis with his thesis adviser Edward Bruner, getting his Ph.D. in 1968.
Bernard's anthropology career after leaving the University of Illinois included work at Washington State University and at West Virginia University. The University of Florida anthropology department recruited him as a full professor and department chair in 1979. In 2015, ASU hired Bernard to direct its Institute for Social Science Research.
Bernard (together with oceanographer Peter Killworth whom he met in 1972 while both were working at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography) designed the "reverse small world" experiment (1978). This took an approach different from Stanley Milgram's "small-world" research, which had been done in the 1960's. Where Milgram had studied the network-distance between two random people (Six degrees of separation), Bernard and Killworth instead asked people to name a person whom they would first approach if they were starting to reach out to contact an unknown person.
Bernard and Killworth also developed the "network scale-up method" (NSUM), a new and inexpensive way to estimate the size of hard-to-count populations. Its original use was to estimate the number of people who had been killed by a recent earthquake. By asking each respondent a number of questions in the form "How many X's do you know?", they were able to use data from populations whose size they knew (doctors, people over 80, etc.) to scale-up from the number of earthquake victims known to each respondent to the probable number of earthquake victims in a population.
Their NSUM mathematical model has also been used to improve calculation of the size of a person's social network. The 1990's Dunbar's number theorem had estimated people's average social network size was about 150. The Bernard-Killworth number was about 290. A survey paper "Thirty Years of The Network Scale-up Method" published in 2021 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association reported that network scale-up methods still needed more improvement but, having "been used in a large number of real-world studies..have offered promising results in the field of size estimation."