Online text, introduction to SNA methods: http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/
What is Social Network Analysis?
- Social networks are a set of ties between actors – but actors can be people, groups, or even concepts
- Actors are seen as interdependent, not independent, autonomous units
- Relational ties are flows of resources, material or non-material
- Network models conceptualize structure (social, economic, political, etc.)
- Relational ties are primary, attributes secondary
What can be studied using SNA?
- Social structure – kinship, social resource mobilization
- Cultural concepts, domains, meaning, information flow
- Economics: business and work practices, trade networks (commodity chain analysis)
- Environmental issues
- Public health – epidemiology
- Political science – policy, popular opinion, national security
- Literary analysis and media consumption
Why is SNA important today?
- Complex interdependence of problems in the social sciences
- Interconnectedness of people, things, and ideas over vast spaces
- Networked individualism: Idea of triple revolution: social network, internet, and mobile (Rainey and Wellman)
- Information and Communications Technology (ICT): Increased visibility of social media has greatly stimulated social network analysis; self-generation of data by users;
- In academia, connected to rise of “digital humanities” and digital studies; in business and government, the use of “big data” in network analysis
SNA concepts
- Graph Theory: study of network structure based on pairwise relations between actors
- Nodes: (also called vertices) – these are the actors
- Edges: connections between nodes, can be directed or undirected
- Neighbors – two nodes connected by an edge
- Social Capital (Putnam) – can be measured by SNA; decline of social capital leads to breakdown of communities
- Bridging: connections with people who are dissimilar; out-group connections
- Bonding: connections with people who are similar; in-group cohesiveness
- Betweenness – (centrality measure) measure of power, connectivity, interface (bridging capital potential)
- Strength of weak ties (Granovetter); people learn about new opportunities not through close friends but through acquaintances; bridges are manifestations of the strength of weak ties
