The effect of network embeddedness : social influence and latent space positions on teachers' resource curation

Few studies on teachers' social networks have extended their scopes from schools to online, leaving gaps and the potential to study how school and district colleagues as well as online-only peers can exert a network influence on teachers' online resource curation activities. These studies have underused the relational-event social-influence model along with the latent space model to estimate the social influence process of teachers' online resource curation, while taking into account their latent positions for potential resource-mediated social selections. Also, few studies have defined the network embeddedness of teachers' resource curation regarding the direct social context of interpersonal networks, as well as the indirect context of the teacher-resource two-mode social space. This dissertation attempted to use the relational-event social-influence model to estimate the online network influence on teachers' resource curation activities, while accounting for a potential resource-mediated social selection process using the latent space model. Using a sample of 55 teachers from Waters School District in Indiana and their curation data on 81 resources across 48 weeks from 2016-17, I found a significant network exposure effect, specifically from online-only peers, after accounting for the potential resource-mediated social selection process. Several interaction effects of individual attributes and resource curation contexts have also been found to moderate the network exposure effect. In conclusion, teachers were influenced by their online networks when curating resources. Though both were significant, the resource-mediated social selection process was not confounded with the social influence process in the one-mode interpersonal network, suggesting that the two social contexts teachers are embedded in played different roles in affecting teachers' resource curation.