Applications of Social Network Analysis

Since its appearance in the 1930s in the form of sociometry, social network analysis (SNA) has become a major paradigm for social research in such areas as communication, organizations, and social mobility, to name but a few. It is used by researchers in a wide range of disciplines: like any mathematical approach to social research, social network analysis strips away the unique details of social situations to reveal, or model, the bare structural essentials. By doing so, it enables the researcher to identify similarities across widely disparate contexts, and so to benefit from the insights of many different fields of study. This major work is dedicated specifically to the applications of social network analysis in diverse fields of scholarship. Divided into four volumes, each of ...

Editor's Introduction: Applications of Social Network Analysis

PeterJ.Carrington

Since its appearance in the 1930s in the form of sociometry, social network analysis has become a major paradigm for social research in such areas as communication, organizations, markets, community, the family and marriage, small group dynamics, social support, social mobility, and animal behavior, to name but a few. It is used by researchers in the disciplines of sociology, social anthropology, social psychology, political science, history, communication science, economics, epidemiology, criminology, ethnology, ethology, physics, information science, etc.

At the heart of social network analysis are three insights or assumptions: that social relations are more important than individual attributes in understanding human society; that the structure of social relations is more important than their content; and that social relations can ...

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