Analyzing Social Networks

B&E 315

This is a 4-day (Mon-Thu) workshop taught by Rich DeJordy. The first day provides a brief refresher about the network perspective which leads into a discussion of the mathematical foundations for social network analysis, particularly graph theory and matrix algebra. The day concludes with an extensive "hands on" tutorial of the two software tools used during the workshop: UCINET and NetDraw.

The second day begins with a brief discussion of social network data, but focuses primarily on entering data into UCINET. Then, from Tuesday afternoon until Thursday morning, each half day session will cover a new analytic technique used in social network analysis, specifically: Measuring Centrality, Cohesive Subgroups, Network & Dyadic Cohesion, and Social Capital & Brokerage. Thursday afternoon is devoted to the special consideration in testing hypotheses based on network data.

The goal of this workshop, as compared to the "Introduction to Social Network Analysis" module, is to focus more on the analytic processes, focus a little more on the software tools (and also move at a slightly faster pace here), and allow more independent work. The workshop will assume fluency in using Windows programs, although not UCINET or NetDraw. For example, after the first day, the goal is for participants to work on the lab exercises independently (or in small groups of students) rather than taking time for the instructor to demonstrate how to calculate various measures in the software. (TAs will circulate helping people who get stuck.) During these labs, participants are encouraged to run the relevant analyses on their data if they have any, either instead of or in addition to running them on the sample data sets.