The Oxford Handbook of Social Networks

Social networks fundamentally shape our lives. Networks channel the ways that information, emotions, and diseases flow through populations. Networks reflect differences in power and status in settings ranging from small peer groups to international relations across the globe. Network tools even provide insights into the ways that concepts, ideas and other socially generated contents shape culture and meaning. As such, the rich and diverse field of social network analysis has emerged as a central tool across the social sciences. This Handbook provides an overview of the theory, methods, and substantive contributions of this field. The thirty-three chapters move through the basics of social network analysis aimed at those seeking an introduction to advanced and novel approaches to modeling social networks statistically. The Handbook includes chapters on data collection and visualization, theoretical innovations, links between networks and computational social science, and how social network analysis has contributed substantively across numerous fields. As networks are everywhere in social life, the field is inherently interdisciplinary and this Handbook includes contributions from leading scholars in sociology, archaeology, economics, statistics, and information science among others.

Author(s):  
Ryan Light ◽  
James Moody

This chapter provides an introduction to this volume on social networks. It argues that social network analysis is greater than a method or data, but serves as a central paradigm for understanding social life. The chapter offers evidence of the influence of social network analysis with a bibliometric analysis of research on social networks. This analysis underscores how pervasive network analysis has become and highlights key theoretical and methodological concerns. It also introduces the sections of the volume broadly structured around theory, methods, broad conceptualizations like culture and temporality, and disciplinary contributions. The chapter concludes by discussing several promising new directions in the field of social network analysis.


Author(s):  
Mohana Shanmugam ◽  
Yusmadi Yah Jusoh ◽  
Rozi Nor Haizan Nor ◽  
Marzanah A. Jabar

The social network surge has become a mainstream subject of academic study in a myriad of disciplines. This chapter posits the social network literature by highlighting the terminologies of social networks and details the types of tools and methodologies used in prior studies. The list is supplemented by identifying the research gaps for future research of interest to both academics and practitioners. Additionally, the case of Facebook is used to study the elements of a social network analysis. This chapter also highlights past validated models with regards to social networks which are deemed significant for online social network studies. Furthermore, this chapter seeks to enlighten our knowledge on social network analysis and tap into the social network capabilities.


Author(s):  
Diane Harris Cline

This chapter views the “Periclean Building Program” through the lens of Actor Network Theory, in order to explore the ways in which the construction of these buildings transformed Athenian society and politics in the fifth century BC. It begins by applying some Actor Network Theory concepts to the process that was involved in getting approval for the building program as described by Thucydides and Plutarch in his Life of Pericles. Actor Network Theory blends entanglement (human-material thing interdependence) with network thinking, so it allows us to reframe our views to include social networks when we think about the political debate and social tensions in Athens that arose from Pericles’s proposal to construct the Parthenon and Propylaea on the Athenian Acropolis, the Telesterion at Eleusis, the Odeon at the base of the South slope of the Acropolis, and the long wall to Peiraeus. Social Network Analysis can model the social networks, and the clusters within them, that existed in mid-fifth century Athens. By using Social Network Analysis we can then show how the construction work itself transformed a fractious city into a harmonious one through sustained, collective efforts that engaged large numbers of lower class citizens, all responding to each other’s needs in a chaine operatoire..


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 505-517
Author(s):  
Carlo Lazzari ◽  
Yasuhiro Kotera ◽  
Hywel Thomas

Background: Little is known on investigating how healthcare teams in dementia wards act for promoting personhood in persons with Alzheimer’s disease (PWA). Objective: The current research aimed to identify the social networks of dementia health carers promoting the personhood of PWA in acute or long-term dementia wards in public and private psychiatric hospitals. Methods: We used a mixed-method research approach. Ethnographic observations and two-mode Social Network Analysis (SNA) captured the role and social networks of healthcare professionals promoting PWA personhood, using SocNetv version 2.4. The social network graphs illustrated how professionals participated in PWA care by computing the degree of centrality (%DC) for each professional; higher values indicated more statistical significance of a professional role compared to others in the provision of personhood care. The categories of personhood were biological, individual, and sociologic. Nurses, doctors, ward managers, hospital managers, clinical psychologists, occupational therapists, care coordinators, physiotherapists, healthcare assistants, and family members were observed if they were promoting PWA personhood. Method: We used a mixed-method research approach. Ethnographic observations and two-mode Social Network Analysis (SNA) captured the role and social networks of healthcare professionals promoting PWA personhood, using SocNetv version 2.4. The social network graphs illustrated how professionals participated in PWA care by computing the degree of centrality (%DC) for each professional; higher values indicated more statistical significance of a professional role compared to others in the provision of personhood care. The categories of personhood were biological, individual, and sociologic. Nurses, doctors, ward managers, hospital managers, clinical psychologists, occupational therapists, care coordinators, physiotherapists, healthcare assistants, and family members were observed if they were promoting PWA personhood. Results: The highest %DC in SNA in biological personhood was held by the ward nurses (36%), followed by the ward doctors (20%) and ward managers (20%). All professional roles were involved in 16% of cases in the promotion of individual personhood, while the hospital managers had the highest %DC (33%) followed by the ward managers and nurses (27%) in the sociologic personhood. Conclusion: All professional roles were deemed to promote PWA personhood in dementia wards, although some limitation exists according to the context of the assessment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Miguel Martín Cárdaba ◽  
Rafael Carrasco Polaino ◽  
Ubaldo Cuesta Cambra

The popularization of Internet and the rise of social networks have offered an unbeatable opportunity for anti-vaccines, especially active communicators, to spread their message more effectively causing a significant impact on public opinion. A great amount of research has been carried out to understand the behavior that anti-vaccine communities show on social networks. However, it seems equally relevant to study the behavior that communities and communicators “pro vaccines” perform in these networks. Therefore, the objective of this research has been to study how members of the Spanish Association of Health Journalist (ANIS) communicate and use the social network Twitter. More specifically, the different interactions made by ANIS partners were analyzed through the so-called “centrality measures of social network analysis” (SNA), to check the configuration of the user network and detect those most relevant by their indexes of centrality, intermediation or mentions received. The research monitored 142 twitter accounts for one year analyzing 254 twits and their 2.671 interactions. The research concluded that the network of ANIS partners on Twitter regarding vaccines has little cohesion and has several components not connected to each other, in addition to the fact that there are users outside the association that show greater relevance than the partners themselves. We also concluded that there are an important lack of planning and direction in the communication strategy of ANIS on Twitter, which limits the dissemination of important content.


Author(s):  
Phu Ngoc Vo ◽  
Tran Vo Thi Ngoc

Many different areas of computer science have been developed for many years in the world. Data mining is one of the fields which many algorithms, methods, and models have been built and applied to many commercial applications and research successfully. Many social networks have been invested and developed in the strongest way for the recent years in the world because they have had many big benefits as follows: they have been used by lots of users in the world and they have been applied to many business fields successfully. Thus, a lot of different techniques for the social networks have been generated. Unsurprisingly, the social network analysis is crucial at the present time in the world. To support this process, in this book chapter we have presented many simple concepts about data mining and social networking. In addition, we have also displayed a novel model of the data mining for the social network analysis using a CLIQUE algorithm successfully.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujata Jindal ◽  
Ritu Sindhu

Social networks are growing day by day. Users of the social networks are generating values for these networks. All the users can’t be considered equal as they have different social network impact value. In this paper we analyze the social impact of a user and propose a method to estimate an individual’s worth to a social network in terms of impact. The mathematical evaluations show the effectiveness of our method. Based on the proposed method many applications can be built taking into consideration the impact any individual’s social profile has. We have tried to make various social data attributes more valuable and meaningful.


Author(s):  
Marcos Luiz Mucheroni ◽  
Gonçalo Costa Ferreira

This paper presents and discusses some of the results of practical application of Social Network Analysis for Information (SNA) to a nonprofit organization, the publishing house Cidade Nova. The article starts by presenting the empirical and methodological options and refers the social networks basic terminology, after which the research procedures are detailed. Lastly, results from the actors Information Social Network (ISN) and from the complete ISN (where alters are included) are presented, to which were used degree, closeness and betweenness centralities, the strength of weak ties of Granovetter and the lambda (?) set measures.


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