What social ties are and how they operate depends on the cultural context constitutive of their meaning. Pursuing an explanatory account for the cultural embeddedness of social ties, we draw on Verstehende sociology and rely on in-depth insight into subjective perceptions developed by social network actors throughout their practice to represent symbolic and material contexts of social ties structurally

The embeddedness of entrepreneurs in a network of social relations has been largely documented by the literature since the seminal work of Granovetter. In different contexts, it has been shown that the entrepreneurial network plays a central role in the creation of their business and provides a variety of resources. Few studies, however, seek to understand the motivations of entrepreneurs when they

Network autocorrelation models (NAMs) are widely used to study a response variable of interest among subjects embedded within a network. Although the NAM is highly useful for studying such networked observational units, several simulation studies have raised concerns about point estimation. Specifically, these studies have consistently demonstrated a negative bias of maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs)

Trellis is a mobile platform created by the Human Nature Lab at the Yale Institute for Network Science to collect high-quality, location-aware, off-line/online, multi-lingual, multi-relational social network and behavior data in hard-to-reach communities. Respondents use Trellis to identify their social contacts by name and photograph, a procedure especially useful in low-literacy populations or in

Much research in network analysis of adolescent friendships assumes that friendships represent liking and social interaction, friendships are directed, and friendships are equivalent to one another. This study investigates the meaning of friendship for eight diverse cohorts of sixth graders. Analysis of focus group and survey data suggests that these adolescents construe friendship as a multidimensional

Is an elite consolidating among the leadership of community-based organizations (CBOs) in U.S. cities? Ethnographers identify a privatized turn in urban governance, with some nonprofit civic leaders becoming a cohesive group with enormous influence in local affairs. However, while researchers propose elite consolidation has occurred and created a more hierarchical, technocratic, and unipolar civic

Environmentally focused social network analysis (Env. SNA) has increasingly benefited from engagement, which refers to the process of incorporating the individuals, organizations, actors, stakeholders or other study participants into the research process. Research about engagement in the wider field of environmental management shows that successful engagement often requires significant planning and

Self-reported social network analysis studies are often complex and burdensome, both during the interview process itself, and when conducting data management following the interview. Through funding obtained from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA/NIH), our team developed the Network Canvas suite of software – a set of complementary tools that are designed to simplify the collection and storage

Several studies suggest a positive relationship between social capital and generalized trust. Employing a network understanding of social capital (Lin, 2001), this study questions which aspects of social networks may be linked with generalized trust. It investigates whether the diversity of social networks and the socio-economic status of one’s contacts are linked with generalized trust in the Norwegian

Network size has a fundamental influence on other network properties. As studies of social network size have accumulated beyond the U.S. and Western Europe, diversity in the networks examined and methods used to construct size estimates have hindered the ability to make direct cross-national comparisons. We employ data from a summary political discussion network size measure in 17 surveys conducted

This article describes and discusses challenges associated with interventionist network data gathering in organizational settings, with a special focus on dyadic interventions. While pointing out major risks of these approaches, we argue that collecting data in combination with dyadic network alteration methods can enable social network researchers to explore network mechanisms from a new angle and

The use of social network analysis to study groups of offenders engaged in illicit activities such as drug trafficking and terrorism has grown in popularity over the last three decades. Along with such growth, however, researchers have been confronted with a suite of challenges related to the use of data extracted from criminal justice records. In this paper, we review these challenges through a discussion

Face-to-face conversation has been shown to be influenced by features that ensure comprehensible and linear conversation (“endogeneity”), and attributes of its potential participants, such as organizational position or contextual role, that “permeate” these endogenous effects. A direct comparison of both features is rarely studied, however, due to methodological challenges it presents. In addition

Egocentric network studies and many general population surveys rely on proxy reports about network contacts of study participants that are asked in name interpreter questions. A central concern is the extent to which proxy reports match the answers these contacts would give themselves if they would be directly interviewed. Based on the theory of survey satisficing, the present research proposes a theoretical

How do new scientific ideas diffuse? Computational studies reveal how network structures facilitate or obstruct diffusion; qualitative studies demonstrate that diffusion entails the continuous translation and transformation of ideas. This article bridges these computational and qualitative approaches to study diffusion as a complex process of continuous adaptation. As a case study, we analyze the spread

A series of papers published by Bernard and colleagues in the late 1970s and early 1980s, dubbed the “accuracy studies,” called into the question the validity of self-reported perceived communication in the study of networks, showing that such reports explain only about 20 % of the variance in directly observed communication. Questions remain about how well the kinds of organizations studied reflect

The literature on attitudes toward objects includes seminal research on threat appraisals indicating that individuals locate an object in a multidimensional threat appraisal space defined by the object's perceived degree of being good or bad, weak or strong, and passive or active. We advance this research in three ways. First, we generalize the information integration on an object with the inclusion

The paper investigates how study participants handle the so-called “hierarchical mapping technique”, an affective name generator developed by Antonucci (1986), which is accompanied by a diagram enabling respondents to compare alters with regard to different degrees of closeness. By applying the thinking-aloud method, we identified three patterns in the order of recalling alters: closeness as overarching

Building social capital and strengthening social networks among members of low-income communities has been recommended as a potential pathway out of poverty. However, it is not clear how network-strengthening interventions and community-based programs interact with pre-existing networks and power structures. We examine the impact of one such intervention in ten low income communities in the Philippines

The authors of articles in this special issue on “Ethics in SNA” contribute to enriching the continuing discussion of major ethical dilemmas that social network analysts need to confront. These articles encourage us to replace silence with thoughtful consideration and innovative paths forward. I highlight three themes that emerged in my own reading of these contributions: moving beyond “ethics versus

Research in social network analysis (SNA) faces unprecedented ethical challenges today due to both technological developments (‘big’ data) and a growing tendency toward institutionalization of ethics governance. We argue that a suitable response requires a more comprehensive approach to SNA ethics, and we identify two main paths toward this goal. First, we need to recognize the breadth of the subject

Reflecting on the compilation and analysis of a range of network datasets drawn from our own work and some prominent examples, we consider the ethical challenges in dealing with network data in business and management settings. We argue that the managerial processes that characterize such settings introduce particular ethical sensitivities in the stages of commissioning and research design, and when

Archaeologists are increasingly interested in networks constructed from site assemblage data, in which weighted network ties reflect sites’ assemblage similarity. Equivalent networks would arise in other scientific fields where actors’ similarity is assessed by comparing distributions of observed counts, so the assemblages studied here can represent other kinds of distributions in other domains. One

This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling a set of directed, binary networks in the context of cognitive social structures (CSSs) data. We adopt a relativist approach in which no assumption is made about the existence of an underlying true network. More specifically, we rely on a generalized linear model that incorporates a bilinear structure to model transitivity effects within networks

The Swiss StudentLife Study (SSL Study) is a longitudinal social network data collection conducted in three undergraduate student cohorts (N1 = 226, N2 = 261, N3 = 660) in 2016−2019. The main goal of the study was to understand the emergence of informal student communities and their effects on different individual outcomes, such as well-being, motivation, and academic success. To this end, multiple

The most common explanation for the current surge of Vaccine Hesitancy is that the Internet helps vaccine science deniers reach a wide audience. This explanation is challenged by the growing success of critics who present themselves as different from antivaccinationists, using phrases such as “I’m not antivaccine but…” and promoting so-called “alternative vaccination schedules”. This could mean that

Previous research finds that individuals tend to form ties with similar others much more often than with dissimilar others. However, we know relatively little about tie loss and to what extent this is driven by (dis)similarity. In this paper, we argue that ties to persons who are dissimilar with regard to gender, age, ethnicity, and education are lost faster than ties to similar persons – and we test

We renovate a classic experiment to define a research platform that provides data on network behavior and the causal effect of access to structural holes. Our hypothesis is that people are perceived to be leaders when they behave as network brokers, which is to say, when they coordinate information across structural holes. We focus on the perception of leadership to connect with the many field studies

Despite a vast literature examining networks in labor markets, it remains unclear how employers differ in their use of networks during recruitment. This study examines network hiring among high and low reputation organizations in Dutch professional football. Within-employer within-transfer window fixed effects conditional logistic regression models demonstrate that networks increase the likelihood

Young adults in Europe sometimes have trouble moving away from their parents and obtaining a home of their own, which is considered an important step in the transition to adulthood. This paper investigates whether nest-leaving is affected by individual social capital and parental economic capital. The paper also examines how these resources are related to the type of housing tenure obtained and whether

The link prediction problem aims to predict new links for future, or missing links or unobserved links in complex networks. Traditional link prediction methods are mostly concentrated on static networks. In this paper, we mainly explore link prediction problems in growing networks. We propose a series of time-sliced metrics to estimate the likelihood of the existence of missing links between two nodes

In the workplace, people seek positive emotional experiences as well as instrumental resources while doing their work. Yet we know little about how affective micro-dynamics drive the evolution of organizational networks, influence network trajectories, and determine macro outcomes such as collective affect and overall network structure. Given the lack of theory on affective micro-dynamics and network

Recent studies have paid more attention to how position-generated social capital varies by an individual’s characteristics, and less to how geographical distributions of occupations may constrain position-specific connections. By integrating two national surveys from the United States, we differentiate the extent to which individual social capital fluctuates by occupational compositions at the county

At the global level, international migration can be considered as a network of migration exchanges between different countries. Employing an exploratory network analysis of the international migration structure, the present paper examines the structural characteristics of this network and the status of the countries. The analysis is done using the socio-spatial approach. Results show that as the severity

The development of typologies is an efficient strategy in the descriptive study of individual differences in the interpersonal environment of relationships. In this paper, we developed a classification of personal networks using structural indicators with a representative sample (n = 403) in a medium-sized city of the metropolitan environment of Seville, in the south of Spain. The typology was based

Crowdfunding platforms serve to connect project creators and backers. Previous research has explored several project and platform determinants that impact crowdfunding outcomes. However, there has been limited research on these determinants at an individual level. Our paper addresses how backers may influence the outcomes of projects in crowdfunding platforms. We explore several methods commonly used

The empirical focus is centered on the large social movement network created by the Koch Brothers to further their aims of transforming the US. The network was obtained by using the VOSON web crawler given a starting set of known allies of the Koch Brothers. This produced a large directed network with links between units. We propose using the idea of hubs and authorities as another way of considering

Collecting social network data is challenging, not least because conventional approaches rely on human participation. However, there are instances where access to research subjects is restricted or non-existent, especially in the high-stakes commercial world. This paper outlines the collection of network data from a relatively obscure financial document – the offering circular. I consider the implications

Historical archives provide invaluable insights into societies of the past, including social networks. However, the required amount of traditional archival work makes historical network studies usually small-scaled. We consider the problem of processing a large corpus of unstructured textual information to extract network data. The corpus consists of almost 170,000 documents of administrative correspondence

Current network scholarship does not explain why negative and positive ties both frequently occur in large numbers in some settings, such as schools. In the present paper, I argue that this can happen when people disproportionately send negative ties to socially close individuals (‘friends of friends’). I propose a new theory—‘intensity theory’—which argues that disliking ties disproportionately occur

Our aim is to explain negative networks in Dutch high schools, using three-wave stochastic actor oriented models (SAOMs). We differentiate between avoidance, antipathy, and aggression based on how costly and visible these behaviours are. Our results show that pupils’ ethnicity does not explain negative ties. Moreover, we do not find that negative ties form archetypical social hierarchies, formed by

Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) is a method of network sampling that is used to sample hard-to-reach populations. The resultant sample is non-random, but different weighting methods can account for the over-sampling of (1) high-degree individuals and (2) homophilous groups that recruit members more effectively. While accounting for degree-bias is almost universally agreed upon, accounting for recruitment-bias

Although it is widely accepted that personal networks influence health and illness, network recall remains a major concern. This concern is heightened when studying a population that is vulnerable to cognitive decline. Given these issues, we use data from the Social Network in Alzheimer Disease project to explore similarities and discrepancies between the network perceptions of focal participants and

We examine the affective content of ties and explore whether negative affective tie content is systematically advantaged or disadvantaged when recalling the social network as compared to positive affective tie content. We test this in three workgroups from two organizations and analyze differences in perceptual accuracy comparing negative and positive affective tie perception. We theorize that ego

To remain competitive worldwide, firms need to focus on their knowledge-based activities and possess specific abilities that allow them to unravel their potential to innovate. This need has led to an increasing interest in understanding the factors that allow a firm to develop its innovation capability. However, given the complexity of the phenomenon, there is no consensus on the nature and definition

In this study we report on our experiences with collecting large personal network data (25 alters) from a representative sample of Dutch women. We made use of GENSI, a recently developed tool for network data collection using interactive visual elements that has been shown to reduce respondent burden. A sample of 758 women between the ages of 18 and 40 were recruited through the LISS-panel; a longitudinal

We simulated diffusion of behaviour change over fifteen real-world networks with seven network interventions under both simple and complex contagion. We found that structural network properties affect both the diffusion outcome and the relative effectiveness of the different interventions, with confounding effects that were inconsistent with results expected from mathematical analysis. These results

The past couple of decades has witnessed an unprecedented rise in organized crime. This rise, coupled with increasing intricacies of organized crime, poses significant and evolving challenges for international law enforcement authorities. With the passage of time, authorities such as Interpol, have discovered that modern criminal organizations have adopted a networked structure, a shift away from the

The aim of the present work is to investigate the relationships established within Cosa Nostra, by making use of networks and complex-systems methods. The analysis is performed at three different levels, that is, individuals, groups within mafia syndicates, and relationships amongst mafia syndicates. The reported empirical analysis is based on the criminal records of 632 affiliates to Cosa Nostra selected

Prison-based therapeutic communities (TCs) are a widespread, effective way to help incarcerated individuals address substance abuse problems. The TC philosophy is grounded in an explicitly relational paradigm that entails building community and conditioning residents to increasingly take responsibility for leadership therein. Although TCs are based on cultivating a network that continuously integrates

Statistical models for social networks have enabled researchers to study complex social phenomena that give rise to observed patterns of relationships among social actors and to gain a rich understanding of the interdependent nature of social ties and actors. Much of this research has focused on social networks within medium to large social groups. To date, these advances in statistical models for

Communication network connectivity is central to organizational performance, but maintaining connectivity can be difficult during periods of disruption. During the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster of September 11th, 2001, both emergency response-specialized organizations and organizations without such specialization forcibly adapted to a radically altered environment. Their dynamic communication networks

Sociological accounts of network inequality typically rely on the logic of preferential attachment, holding that individuals in a social network prefer to form ties with central rather than peripheral actors. We develop an alternative explanation for the growth of network inequality that does not require actors to have knowledge about the social position of others or to hold explicit preferences for

As part of a larger project on trust and co-operation in IT-Security, the author collected network data from an international security team specialized in cyber-incident response, leading to the only dataset of its kind. Collecting these data involved a number of challenges. First, the team in question had recently been established and was based in a large international firm. Thus, the author had to

The increasing use of smartphones around the world provides new opportunities for network data collection using smartphone surveys. We investigated experimentally whether the use of smartphones and of a recall aid affects the number of reported names in a network name generator question. In a German online access panel (N = 3891), respondents were randomly assigned to answer the survey on their PC

Our study examines the interactive effect of organizational status distance and geographical proximity on interpersonal professional tie formation. Whereas Blau (1977, 1994) proposes that geographical proximity will weaken the negative effect of organizational status distance on professional tie formation, our analysis of co-authorship in academic accounting over a 30-year period shows that geographical

Large-scale online marketplace data have been repeatedly used to test sociological theories on trust between strangers. Most studies focus on sellers’ aggregate reputation scores, rather than on buyers’ individual decisions to trust. Theoretical predictions on how repeated exchanges affect trust within dyads and how buyers weigh individual experience against reputation feedback from other actors have

Illegal markets are notoriously difficult to study. Police data offer an increasingly exploited source of evidence. However, their secondary nature poses challenges for researchers. A key issue is that researchers often have to deal with two sets of actors: targeted and non-targeted. This work develops a latent space model for interdependent ego-networks purposely created to deal with the targeted

Latent variable network models that accommodate edge correlations implicitly, by assuming an underlying latent factor, are increasing in popularity. Although, these models are examples of what is a growing body of research, much of the research is focused on proposing new models or extending others. There has been very little work on unifying the models in a single framework. In this paper, we present

Cascade and threshold models are widely used to predict information diffusion in social networks, yet their characterization of networks as static and monoplex limit their ability to accurately predict how information propagates in dynamic, multiplex social environments. Using data from a peer-led HIV prevention intervention for homeless youth, we determine whether manipulating the baseline social