Ordered Network Analysis

Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) is a socio-cognitive process that is interactive, interdependent, and temporal. As individuals interact with each other, information is added to the common ground, or the current state of a group's shared understanding, which in turn influences individuals' subsequent responses to the common ground. Therefore, to model CPS processes, especially in a context where the order of events is hypothesized to be meaningful, it is important to account for the ordered aspect. In this study, we present Ordered Network Analysis (ONA), a method that can not only model the ordered aspect of CPS, but also supports visual and statistical comparison of ONA networks. To demonstrate the analytical affordances and interpretable visualizations of ONA, we analyzed the collaborative discourse data of air defense warfare teams. We found that ONA was able to capture the qualitative differences between the control and experimental condition that cannot be captured using unordered models, and also tested that such differences were statistically different.