Social Networks

Introduction

For most of Western psychology, the assumption is made that the person is a distinct and separable object of study. Our efforts to understand the human being and to predict human behaviour have focused largely upon attributes considered to be parts of the individual psyche. This has been true despite theory and confirming evidence to show how interdependent we are with our ecology, our attachments, and our relationships. The dominant approach fails to take cognizance of the degree to which people are in fact interdependent and that the boundaries of the person are actually quite fluid. A full understanding of the individual depends upon an appreciation of the nature, and of the degree, of a person's interdependence with a broader sustaining ecology and, particularly, with contacts with other people.

Concept of Social Networks

Network analysis brings the connections among people to the fore. Its early use was in the study [Page 902]of non-Western cultures. Some anthropologists recognized that their own assumptions about the nature of families, clans, or tribes created a bias in their observations. Rather than assume the nature of the social entity, they instead created a plot describing the actual transactions that occurred among people. Barnes (1972) studied a Norwegian fishing village examining actual interactions and found that they reflected kinship, social class, and work groups. He plotted circumstances in which one person communicated with another only through a third party. He documented occasions in which person A might have separate links with person B and person C, but the relationship between B and C could affect the A-B connection. Bott (1957) studied the marital and family relationships of people in a low socio-economic class. Her use of network analysis permitted her to show how the communication between wife and husband was directly related to the intensity of their separate involvement with their own families and friends. Network assessment has also been used for more general studies of communication and social class (Campbell et al., 1986).

The network is essentially a set of dots (or nodes) and connecting lines (or links). It borrows from an application of graph theory to the visual representation of sociograms or social network maps (Harary, Norman & Cartwright, 1965). The direction of the transactions across the line may be specified and the graph may cover every transaction that occurs, only those that affect a particular individual, or only those that involve a specific commodity such as money or affection. It might also be restricted to in-person exchanges or it may include those by telephone, mail or email. There are many ways to describe a network and many ways to tabulate what occurs within it. To gain a handle on how best to describe an actual network and to see what is revealed by its depiction it is useful to examine the field of network analysis. The theory is largely descriptive and can be useful in the design of surveys (Brugha et al., 1987). One major survey examined who among Canadian seniors provides what kind of help to friends and family members (Stone et al., 1988).

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