Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications

Sociology S651

Spring 2005

Stanley Wasserman (stanwass@indiana.edu)

Social network analysis focuses on relationships between social entities. It is used widely in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as in political science, economics, organizational science, and industrial engineering. The social network perspective, which will be taught in this workshop, has been developed over the last sixty years by researchers in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and more recently, to a lesser extent, in physics.

The social network paradigm is gaining recognition and standing in the general social and behavioral science communities as the theoretical basis for examining social structures. This basis has been clearly defined by many theorists, and the paradigm convincingly applied to important substantive problems. However, the paradigm requires a new and different set of concepts and analytic tools, beyond those provided by standard quantitative (particularly, statistical) methods. These concepts and tools are the topics of this course.

The course will present an introduction to various concepts, methods, and applications of social network analysis drawn from the social, behavioral, and political sciences. The primary focus of these methods is the analysis of relational data measured on groups of social actors. Topics to be discussed include an introduction to graph theory and the use of directed graphs to study structural theories of actor interrelations; structural and locational properties of actors, such as centrality, prestige, and prominence; subgroups and cliques; equivalence of actors, including structural equivalence, blockmodels, and an introduction to role algebras; an introduction to local analyses, including dyadic and triad analysis; and statistical global analyses, using models such as p1, p*, and their relatives.