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SOCPROG programs: analysing animal social structures

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Abstract

SOCPROG is a set of programs which analyses data on animal associations. Data usually come from observations of the social behaviour of individually identifiable animals. Associations among animals, sampling periods, restrictions on the data and association indices can be defined very flexibly. SOCPROG can analyse data sets including 1,000 or more individuals. Association matrices are displayed using sociograms, principal coordinates analysis, multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses. Permutation tests, Mantel and related tests and matrix correlation methods examine hypotheses about preferred associations among individuals and classes of individual. Weighted network statistics are calculated and can be tested against null hypotheses. Temporal analyses include displays of lagged association rates (rates of reassociation following an association). Models can be fitted to lagged association rates. Multiple association measures, including measures produced by other programs such as genetic or range use data, may be analysed using Mantel tests and principal components analysis. SOCPROG also performs mark-recapture population analyses and movement analyses. SOCPROG is written in the programming language MATLAB and may be downloaded free from the World Wide Web.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Robin Baird, Jenny Christal, Susan Dufault, Shane Gero, Shannon Gowans, Andrea Ottensmeyer and, especially, David Lusseau for ideas and testing of the programs. Susan Dufault put SOCPROG on the World Wide Web. The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. I am grateful for the constructive and detailed comments of two anonymous reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, B3H 4J1

    Hal Whitehead

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  1. Hal Whitehead
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Correspondence to Hal Whitehead.

Additional information

Communicated by L. Z. Garamszegi.

Appendix

Appendix

Some technical details

The SOCPROG programs are in the programming language MATLAB (The MathWorks, Inc., 24 Prime Park Way, Natick, Massachusetts, USA 01760-1500; www.mathworks.com). Programs were originally (1997) written in MATLAB4.2 plus the Statistics Toolbox, but the current version (SOCPROG 2.3) uses MATLAB7.4 plus the Statistics Toolbox. It should be very largely compatible with any other MATLAB7 version.

The standard version of the programs (which needs MATLAB plus the Statistics toolbox) and the compiled version (which does not need MATLAB, but possesses some limitations) can be downloaded free from the web site: http://myweb.dal.ca/hwhitehe/social.htm. There is also an online version of the manual at this site.

The programs were developed on the Windows versions of MATLAB, but they are known to work reasonably well on the UNIX, LINUX and Macintosh versions. The compiled version of SOCPROG can only be used on Windows platforms.

After downloading the uncompiled version, the user receives a .zip file containing the following: a .pdf version of the manual; SOCPROG MATLAB script and function files; a .pdf list of the MATLAB script and function files, what they do, and some important variables (useful for those with MATLAB experience, and especially those who wish to alter the programs for their own purposes); and simulated data sets which can be used to explore the programs.

The compiled version contains: a .pdf version of the manual; MCRInstaller.exe (which installs a program to run compiled MATLAB code); files with compiled SOCPROG code and simulated data sets which can be used to explore the programs. The fundamental drawback of using the compiled version of MATLAB is a loss of flexibility: The code cannot be changed to perform the exact analysis desired; further analysis of the results in MATLAB is impossible. Perhaps the biggest disadvantage for most users is that the figures and graphs produced by SOCPROG cannot be modified easily (in the uncompiled version they can be altered easily in a huge range of ways). However, the compiled figures can be exported (e.g. as .emf files) which can be edited by other programs.

Support can usually be obtained (often after a delay of some days) by emailing me at hwhitehe@dal.ca.

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Whitehead, H. SOCPROG programs: analysing animal social structures. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 63, 765–778 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-008-0697-y

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