Social Network Analysis

- accessible, easy to understand, and a great pocket guide while writing a paper

This got delivered in essentially a pdf format. Buy another copy.

Good read and introductory information for the beginning scholar

As a former member of the academe whose research and publications are about new media, I'm surprised I hadn't come across an earlier edition of this book.Like the author says, this is more of a guidebook than something you can read cover to cover. It's intended as a reference for graduate-level social science research, and it shows. If you purchase this book expecting to use it as a how-to for applied market research, you're going to be sorely disappointed.Overall, I found this book quite informative. It reads like a research methodology textbook (as you'd expect from a book published by SAGE) -- that is, dry and fraught with discussion of theory -- but to the right audience this would be quite valuable.The back cover proclaims that this edition "incorporate[s] the most important and cutting-edge developments in the field"; I don't know about cutting-edge, but it does discuss a lot of important methodological concepts implicated in mass comm research, and I'd certainly recommend this to any MA student who plans to study new media.That said, I think this book could be improved by a bit more depth. It's clearly aimed at graduate (or professorial) researchers; it's focused on academic research, and it's much too high-level for undergraduates. But everything in this book is more of a primer than a thorough discussion of the material. That's not to say it's a bad book -- I'm still going to recommend it to my former colleagues -- but like I said, it's a starting point for the discussion.

Social networks pre-date the internet and they are an important source of analysis for sociologists and historians. A variety of software programs allow collection of data and modeling of these networks, but they are not "plug and play." This book is not a manual for any of those programs, however, and it is not a "for dummies" explanation of social networks. A considerable amount of thought should go into defining the data to be collected, the assumptions behind those definitions, and the ways in which the data may misrepresent the actual social relationships. John Scott's chapters on data collection and organization and analysis (3 & 4) provide an excellent overview of the challenges in defining relationships. A serious consideration of his cautions will prevent some serious missteps during project design. Subsequent chapters are an excellent guide to understanding what the data starts to show the analyst. We should be interested, after all, in the interpretation of the data, not just a pretty graph.

Good book on Social Network Analysis basics and as an intro to this area of research. But someone doing a research project in this area would require a more in-depth guide. The book provides some different approaches and mentions some software options including Pajek, UNICET, and SIENA, so this section may not be as useful if you are using other software. It is written as a graduate level textbook with exercises and recommendations for further reading. I don't think this book would be as useful to a non-student who is just interested in the topic of social media research and using social media data for analysis. You are better off with the tools available within the platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) or using a commercial software tool for data analysis (like HootSuite). This is definitely an academic-focused book on social science research using social media and social networks as data.

No, this isn’t just about Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and all the other social networks you may first think of. This is about a sociologist’s view of social networks, that is all the varying groups that humans form. Quoting the author, social network analysis “ comprises a broad approach to sociological analysis and a set of methodological techniques that aim to describe and explore the patterns apparent in the social relationships that individuals and groups form with each other”. We’re humans and we form networks, which by their very nature are social. Family. Friends. Co-workers. Tribe, Clan. State. Nation. But how to measure those networks? How to describe the dynamics? Statistically. Mathematically. All things, including behaviors, can be reduced to numbers. And essentially, this is the introductory text to showing you how. It is very dense, but well-written. It is most certainly intended to be used as a text, but the person who is interested in statistics and the operation of social networks, will find the book interesting, if not fascinating. I can’t really judge it as a text. My observation is that it would take a talented instructor to make this material come alive to a presumably uninterested student. But as that self-described reader with an interest in statistics and learning how people interact in their networks, it’s an enthralling, if difficult, read.Jerry