Social Network Analysis

The film ‘How Social Networks Predict Epidemics’ by Nicholas Christakis explores the influence of social networks on people’s lives and how it can be used to predict epidemics.Social networks are key connectors among individuals in all societies today. They are avenues through which people learn and share many new things with others. Social networks are so instrumental in determining many issues like employment and salaries, and the transmission of diseases. It is, therefore, crucial to comprehend why and how the networks influence the patterns as they do.

One can argue that social media lets us connect to one another. Yes, this is true to some extent but social media can also be the source of people driving each other away. When we are so busy having our noses in our phone constantly we miss everything that goes on around us. We lose a sense of communication when falling into this temptation of always having to know to what is happening on our phone. Thomas Freidman stated that he feels technology is dividing us instead of uniting us after experiencing a taxi ride gone wrong in the sense of the driver constantly chatting on his phone. After Apple introduced the iPod it seems the world has slowly drifted to a state silence. In Steve Johnson’s essay Social Connections, he tells of the time before

College is a time in which adolescents finally have the opportunity to explore the desires of their hearts and escape the environments they once referred to as home. The relationships, memories, and knowledge the youth of today ascertain while embarking on this journey are some of the most influential moments these individuals will ever experience. It is not a coincidence that many view college as the “best four years of your life”. Beside all the joyous expectations of this pivotal time frame in a young adult’s life, college also serves as a time for students to mold their professional network. The aspects of a professional network include intangibles such as, interpersonal bonds, the reputation an individual holds within a community, and

Through the various readings we see that networks tend to have (1) resource interdependence between actors (2) the involvement of multiple actors, each with their own interests and

The article, “How to Build Your Network” by Uzzi and Dunlap helped me understand the strengths and weaknesses of my network, how to improve it and the significance of a strong network. Before the exercise, I was not aware of how limited my network is. While my network does not rely on the ‘self-similarity principle’, it does contain weaknesses through my use of the ‘proximate principle’. One way I can improve my network is through focusing on building contacts through collecting powerful brokers and using the ‘shared activity principle’. Networks are powerful systems and are strongest when built with trust, diversity, and brokerage.

The human need to belong is so deeply ingrained that we create groups not just for survival but also for support, happiness, and advancement. For the majority of individuals the support provided by family and social groups fulfills the need to belong and provides positive influences with very little disruption within communities. But for many others, particularly juveniles with antisocial attitudes, becoming involved with a gang fulfills the need to belong. Just as with other types of social groups, “[g]angs form under incentives derived from the direct and indirect costs and benefits of gang membership”(Dnes & Garoupa, 2010, p.526).

Sandra Braman describes a network in action as interconnection, the process of bringing together different networks “so that messages and data can flow between them in a way that is transparent, or unobservable, to the user” (2009, 193). Braman states these interconnected messages flow across many social structures, which she lists as “the community, the organization, and the network” (2009, 169). Presently, I am building my own professional network of interconnected social structures that will help me protect what is important to me: my future goal to work for the U.S. Foreign Service. Drawing from Braman’s idea of interconnected social structures, I will reflect on a variety of sources to support how my blossoming network of

Professional development providers play a key role in the policy implementation process by supporting teachers as they learn about and enact new policies. The adoption of the Common Core standards in many states has placed new demands on teachers and schools. By mediating between policy and the classroom, PD providers are in a unique position to influence how teachers understand and ultimately implement new policies. Using social network analysis and the theory of brokerage, this study has explored how PD providers access and activate social capital to support PD planning and delivery. Brokers have the potential to play a critical role in shaping the flow and content of information and resources in a social network. This impacts the social

The complexity of the relationships includes the amount of one way, two way, or more complicated relationships within the group. The diversity of people within the network is important because it helps distinguish is members are male, female, or if the members of the group are family. The subgroups, cliques, and linkages show the relationship between the members and includes whether they are members of another group. Finally the communication in the network is the flow of information from one member to the next and includes whether or not the one member is more credible than the next. The Social Network theory is a complex “sociogram” explaining the different relationships people can have and the impact they have on behavioral changes (Edberg,

Social networks are seen by many people in society as a drain of time, resources and focus from more important tasks that can be accomplished in person. Yet these critics are missing a vital link of social networks and their embryonic state today

The internet is a prime example of a technology that is adding to the human condition. It provides information, and the spread of this information is amazingly rapid. Online communities and forums are breeding grounds for new ideas. Up until this period in history, social relationships have been strictly defined by geographical limitations. As found by social psychologist Leon Festinger, best known

The Internet increases community access enabling users to communicate with forty percent of the world, over three billion people (Internet). Increasing by almost thirty thousand users a day the Internet exhibits amounts of efficiency surpassing “ that of other communication technologies”(Howard 383). Before the Internet social networks were limited to local communities. Communication mainly occurred between people geographically close. The Internet has broken the constraint geography placed on community. Sociologist Barry Wellman discusses the Internets extension of society connectedness in Connecting Community: On- and Offline. With the Internet, people have “global connectivity” and “[i]nstead of being bound up in a neighborhood community where all know all” people create networks based on their unique traits not proximity (Wellman 25,27). Through this increased exchange between diverse people the global social capital is increased as well. The world as one large society sees a connectedness that benefits everyone as a whole and

(In a socio-centric network analysis, by contrast, information is gathered from each person, about each person, in a relatively closed network.) A frequent focus of SNA studies is homophily, or the tendency of individuals who are similar in their beliefs, attitudes and behaviors to be linked more frequently and more closely in social networks than those who are dissimilar [11]. In his classic housing study, Festinger [12] found evidence of homophily based on propinquity, the tendency of people who live close together to be more connected. Social network analysis is also used to examine the structural characteristics of social networks.

* What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made, but that is often not the goal, and these meetings are frequently between "latent ties" (Haythornthwaite, 2005) who share some offline connection. On many of the large SNSs, participants are not necessarily "networking" or looking to meet new people; instead, they are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network. To emphasize this articulated social network as a critical organizing feature of these sites, we label them "social network sites."

There are several key concepts at the heart of network analysis that are fundamental to the discussion of social networks that should be clarified for discussing social networks and social network data that are required in the network analysis. These concepts are actor, relational tie, group, relation, and network. The first concepts, actors are discrete individual, corporate, or collective social units that applicably focus on collections of actors that are all of the same type, such as member of entrepreneurs’ group, or an organisation (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). However, some methods allow looking at actors of conceptually different types or levels, or from different