An Overview of Social Network Analysis

Abstract

Social network analysis refers both to a view that social relations provide crucial insight to human behavior and to a set of analytic tools that enable the study of these social relations. Both practitioners and theorists interested in crime can gain important knowledge from a focus on social networks, as the growing literature in criminology demonstrates. This article provides an introduction for scholars interested in becoming better versed in the concepts of basic social network concepts and techniques, as well as a discussion about the conditions under which this form of analysis may be particularly useful.

Notes

1. Similarly, nodes can be of many different types, including individuals, organizations, countries, and groups.

2. In addition to adjacency matrices, there are also incident matrices, in which the rows are the nodes and the columns are incidents, events, or affiliations (i.e., the value in a cell would indicate whether a particular node was part of that specific incident, event, or affiliated with that specific group).

3. See the following link for information on the Add Health data repository: http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth