Social Networks

Social networks is a field of study that focuses on the pattern, or structure, of relations among a set of actors. For example, while traditional explanations of career success often focus on a person's training or education, a social network perspective would emphasize his or her connections to others within an organization. Similarly, while leadership is often thought of as a set of personal abilities and skills, a social network analysis would focus on the leader's relations with othersfor example, the relations between the leader and his or her followers or the bridging role the leader provides to outside groups both of which might enhance or inhibit the leader's effectiveness.

To understand how social network analysis is different from other perspectives on social phenomena, it is useful to understand the distinction between units of analysis and levels of analysis. The unit of analysis refers to the aggregation of people into units of interest as primary actors in a system. For example, the field of social networks is sufficiently interdisciplinary that one can find studies of networks of all kinds of units, including people, organizations, industries, and even nations. For present purposes, however, this entry focuses on social networks in which people are the unit of analysis.

The level of analysis, in contrast, is more complex because it refers to different aggregations of the structural or relational features of interest, and it may be best described by example. Consider a network made up of N friends. We can identify the levels of analysis of this network on a log scale from 0 to 3 as follows: Level 0 refers to the network structure as a whole, Level 1 refers to properties of the N actors in the network, Level 2 refers to properties of the individual dyadic relations between all pairs of actors in the network, and Level 3 refers to the perceptions that each of the N actors has of the dyadic relationships in the network. Each level of analysis sheds light on a different aspect of the social relations that characterize the network. The different insights that can be gained from the levels of analysis are illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 (both adapted from real examples of work teams).