Detecting Role Equivalence

Hummell and Sodeur (1987) propose a practical solution to detecting role equivalence in social network data. The solution is very fast, equally applicable to symmetric and asymmetric relations, involves no iterative computing, and is now readily available as one of the equivalence options in STRUCTURE. Unfortunately, their paper is only available in German in a book published for their colleagues in Germany. The purpose of this brief note is to give their extremely useful idea wider exposure. 1