Social Network Analysis

How and what we consume, like our behavior more generally, is shaped by our interactions and relations with other people and by networks generated through interactions and relations between the multiple actors in the various populations to which we belong. There is a growing recognition in social science that networks are central to a proper understanding of taste and consumption. This poses a methodological challenge, however, as most standard methods of data gathering and analysis are not well suited to the analysis of relational data, that is, data on relations between actors.

Social network analysis (SNA) is a set of techniques for handling, analyzing, and visualizing such data. It is a structural method that is used to examine the pattern of connection among a set of ...