A qualitative, network-centric method for modeling socio-technical systems, with applications to evaluating interventions on social media platforms to increase social equality

Applied Network Science

Table 1 An overview of the steps required for AH-development with examples from our application to online dating

Steps	Example from online dating (OD) setting
1. Choose the perspectives	Platform and User
2. Decide on model boundaries	Only one online dating platform
	Exclude other contributors to racial inequality
	Exclude processes by which users join and leave the platform
	Analyze an online dating platform focused on building long-term relationships
3. Construct the Abstraction hierarchy	Graph where nodes exist at five different levels of analysis, with edges between select nodes in consecutive layers
3. Construct the Abstraction hierarchy	E.g., We added ’Finding a long term partner’ on the functional purpose layer, ’Cultural expectations’ on the layer below (abstract functions), and an edge between the two