January 23, 2010

Kunal Shridhar

Social Network Analysis

Social networks play an important role in evolution of society. A social network is a social structure that consists of people, organizations, groups, households, states etc. These individual units are called nodes/actors. These nodes in a social network are connected by relationships/ties like friendship, kinship, co-worker, roles (boss of, teacher of). Even simple things like talks to, has same car, has similar views, gives money to, attacks, hates, loves, goes out with etc. are used to connect nodes in a social network. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the study of these relationships (called social relationships) among a set of actors. It provides a mathematical analysis of social relationships. In SNA, social relationships are viewed using graphs where nodes are individual actors within the network and ties/edges are relationships between the actors. Due to possibility of many different kind of ties between nodes, the resulting graph representation is often very complex. In addition to the graphs, we also use Matrix theory in SNA. The main reason for using such mathematical analysis is that it allows us to use computers for analyzing the network data. A number of computer programs are available for SNA, P*Star, UNINet being on top of my head. One other reason is that using graphs for SNA, sometimes, lead us to see things which are normally not visible if the data is described only in words. In SNA, we need to find location of actors in a network to properly understand the network and its participants. For doing this we measure centrality of a node in network. This gives a rough indication about the power of the node i.e. how well it connects the network, various roles and grouping in networks - who are the connectors, bridges, isolates, leaders, who is at the core of network and who is at the boundary and so on. Betweeness centrality, Closeness centrality and Degree centrality are three most important centrality measures. Besides these three, there is one more measure of centrality called Eigenvector centrality which tells the importance of a node in network by assigning relative scores to all the nodes in the network based on some principle. The information about centralities of all the nodes can tell a lot about the network structure. A very centralized network consists of only a few central nodes. Removal of these nodes leads to division of network into unconnected sub-networks. Thus, there are single points of failure in very centralized networks. A less centralized network has no single point of failure. Many nodes have to fail so as to have division of network into unconnected sub-networks. Basically, two different kinds of network analysis are there, each reflecting different kinds of data. These are egocentric network analysis and complete network analysis. In egocentric network analysis, the analysis is done on a single node and only its very close neighbors are taken in account during analysis. In complete network analysis, all the nodes and ties in network are considered i.e. whole of the network is taken into account. Complete network analysis is generalized to other networks.

The advantages of performing social network analysis is that it helps people understand how to share professional knowledge in an efficient manner and to evaluate the performance of the individuals, groups, organizations or even entire social network. Researchers are busy studying how these social networks affect the performance of individuals and teams. Individuals are often influenced by the behavior of their peers. Studies have shown that an individual puts more effort and improves his/her performance when he/she is working with more able teammates. Research shows that an individuals job performance is a function of his/her network position in actual work settings. Results show that higher the centrality of an individual, the better is his/her performance. A central individual has more means to obtain resources and important information needed for completing a job than a less central individual. High centrality implies the power and independency on others. A highly central individual gains expertise in his/her field much more quickly than less central individuals. This happens only when relationships among actors in network are positive. Negative relationships also exist in workplace. In that case, centrality is negatively related to an individuals performance. Lack of cooperation and teamwork is the result of negative relations which causes performance to go down. One special class of social networks is structurally diverse networks. Social network theory indicates that these structurally diverse networks have positive effects on work performance. These networks are low in cohesion and high in structural holes. Holes in a social network refer to the absence of ties that would otherwise connect unconnected parts together. Individuals who bridge these holes get early exposure to novel information and are responsible for information flow between unconnected clusters. This structural holes theory is based on betweenness centrality. To study the effects of social networks on team performance, the density of network is accessed. Density of network indicates the overall level of interaction in the team. In case of advice networks, the density is positively related to the team performance. In case of hindrance networks, density is negatively related to the team performance. Despite of the usefulness of Social Network Analysis in fields of social sciences, biology, communication sciences, information theory and numerous other fields, there has been significant amount of criticism and problems associated with the field. The field is criticized for being too much methodological and too little theoretical. One very serious problem associated with Social Network Analysis is that we dont yet have sufficient computing resources that can handle large datasets. We cant allow network to grow too large while performing SNA since we wont be able to handle such a large amount of data with the currently available computing resources for SNA.