Every person has social relationships with other people, and these people have relationships with yet other people. In the offline world, social networks abound although sometimes less visibly or formally defined. The sum total of a person’s connections would then make up their personal social network (also known as an ego network).

This connection represents a social relationship of some kind between the two people, whether it be that they are actually friends, colleagues, family members, romantic partners, or simply admirers or fans. Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, are basically just formalized social networks which connect people as friends or followers. Today, we are all familiar with the concept of social networks, to at least a small extent, thanks to the Internet. And thanks to the incredible technological progress of the past few decades, the power of social network analysis to explain social phenomena has flourished into a myriad of possibilities. By visually diagramming social networks, a practice almost as old as the field of sociology itself, we are able to precisely map these interconnections and understand exactly how and through what mechanisms they shape us.

Wright Mills (1959) famously said, “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” One of the most effective methods to developed to study the social world is the analysis of social networks. Social Network AnalysisĪ fundamental principle of sociology is the idea that no individual exists in a vacuum we are all embedded in structures of social relationships which influence us in innumerable ways.

Each post will examine a different method from a sociological perspective.

**This post is the first in a 4 part educational series I wrote in a graduate seminar on computational research methods.

Network analysis definition sociology