Social network analysis
Making connections: Social
contexts: Affiliation and Identity
This page is part of the materials supporting Sociology
157, an undergraduate introductory course on social network analysis. The course is taught
by Robert A. Hanneman of the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. Feel free to use and reproduce this textbook (with citation). For more information, or to offer comments,
you can send me e-mail.
Sources:
Watts, chapter 4
Degree distribution and "scale free" networks
- Basic ideas
- Normal, Poisson, and Exponential degree distributions
- The rich get richer, but it's hard (cutoffs and local knowledge of new
nodes)
- Evidence for scale-free networks
- Boards of directors
- Scientific collaboration
- The internet
- Are social networks scale free?
- Even very large networks have cut-offs
- Clustering and random connection are not homogeneous
Re-introducing social structure - contexts (roles or identities) and
groups
- The "connection topology" created by multi-role identities and
multiple group memberships
- Affiliation or bi-partite networks
- Watts "final" theory: clustering by context with random
re-wiring of contexts
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index of lecture outlines
course home page