D-Lab is hosting three statistical workshops of the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research. Payment and registration are handled by ICPSR. ICPSR offers some fee discounts.
Network analysis focuses on relationships between or among social entities. It is used widely in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as in political science, economics, organizational studies, behavioral biology, and industrial engineering. The social network perspective, which will be taught in this workshop, has been developed over the last sixty years by researchers in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The social network paradigm is gaining recognition in the social and behavioral sciences as the theoretical basis for examining social structures. This basis has been clearly defined and the paradigm convincingly applied to important substantive problems. However, the paradigm requires concepts and analytic tools beyond those provided by standard quantitative (particularly, statistical) methods. This five day workshop covers those concepts and tools. The course will present an introduction to concepts, methods, and applications of social network analysis drawn from the social and behavioral sciences. The primary focus of these methods is the analysis of relational data measured on groups of social actors. Topics include an introduction to graph theory and the use of directed graphs to study actor interrelations; structural and locational properties of actors, such as centrality, prestige, and prominence; subgroups and cliques; equivalence of actors, including structural equivalence, blockmodels, and an introduction to relational algebras; an introduction to local analyses, including dyadic and triadic analyses; and an introduction to statistical analyses, using models such as p1 and exponential random graph models. The workshop will use several common software packages for network analysis: UCINET, Pajek, NetDraw, and STOCNET.
