Social network analysis

Social network analysis studies relationships among people, groups, or other social entities by representing them as networks and examining their structure and patterns.

Graph theory: The mathematical study of graphs, which consist of vertices connected by edges. Its vertices and edges provide the formal language for representing social entities and ties.
Degree centrality: A measure of a vertex's importance based on the number of its direct connections. It identifies actors with many immediate social ties.
Diffusion of innovations: The process by which new ideas, practices, or technologies spread through a population. Social ties shape who encounters an innovation and how quickly it spreads.
Jacob Moreno: A Romanian-American psychiatrist who developed psychodrama and pioneered sociometric study of relationships. His sociograms made interpersonal choices visible as mapped networks.
Social network: A set of social entities connected by relationships such as friendship, communication, or collaboration. It is the relational structure that social network analysis represents and studies.
Betweenness centrality: A measure of how often a vertex lies on shortest paths between other vertices. It captures brokerage positions that connect otherwise separated parts of a network.
Influence maximization: The problem of selecting a small set of nodes to maximize information or behavior spread through a network. It uses network structure to identify effective starting points for campaigns.
Harvard structural sociology: A mid-twentieth-century research tradition that combined social theory, field studies, and network analysis at Harvard. Its scholars helped establish social networks as a rigorous object of sociological study.
Adjacency matrix: A square matrix that records which pairs of vertices in a graph are connected. It encodes who is connected to whom in a form suitable for computation.
Network density: The proportion of possible edges that are present in a network. It summarizes how extensively members of a group are connected.

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