Over the past three decades, educational research, policy, and practice have become increasingly interested in relationships and collaboration. In response, social network analysis (SNA) emerged as a theoretical and methodological framework, offering tools to explore relationships in depth. Compared to then existing approaches, SNA allows capturing relationships in a more nuanced way, by focusing on the patterns and qualities of relationships (Borgatti, Mehra, Brass, & Labianca, 2009). SNA offers a valuable perspective for examining whether and to what degree interaction and collaboration take place in education. Another key strength of SNA is that it offers several tools to visualize relationships (Hogan, Carrasco, & Wellman, 2007), which not only creates opportunities for (visual) research but also for practice (e.g., for intervention and feedback purposes). The potential of SNA is reflected in a surge in publications from 37 in 2003 to more than 400 a decade later in the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC; Froehlich, Rehm, & Rienties, 2019). SNA has established its usefulness in various educational sub-fields, for instance, in examining the role of relationships for student achievement (Moolenaar, Sleegers, & Daly, 2012), reform and improvement (Penuel, Bell, Bevan, Buffington, & Falk, 2016), policy implementation (Coburn, Russell, Kaufman, & Stein, 2012), and leadership (Spillane & Shirrell, 2017). No other methodological framework is that much focused on the in-depth exploration of the roles of relationships and structures in learning and instruction (Moolenaar, 2012; Sweet, 2016). The surge in SNA publications across the academic disciplines is largely driven by quantitative SNA studies (Freeman, 2004). Despite its merits, this formalized approach to network analysis has been criticized for a lack of attention to the qualitative aspects of relationships (Fuhse & Mützel, 2011; Hollstein, 2011). Recent work convincingly addresses these concerns by combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. These approaches succeed in addressing research questions not only related to the formal or structural side of relationships and networks. They also attend to questions related to the actual content and meaning of interactions, the (day to day) variability of social relationships, the developments of nodes and ties, and the idea of agency (Crossley, 2010; Crossley & Edwards, 2016).In this article, we posit that mixing methods within SNA is an original innovation that will help to answer new sets of research questions in education research (Bolíbar, 2015; Domínguez & Hollstein, 2014). We argue that a systematic review of mixed method social network analysis (MMSNA) is needed (1) to offer an overview of the existing body of work in education, (2) to show the merits of this approach, and (3) to develop a set of pointers for conducting rigorous MMSNA research and to support scholars in conducting future MMSNA research.
Exploring intellectual capital through social network analysis: a conceptual framework