Examples of Social ties in the following topics:
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- An adjacency matrix is a square actor-by-actor (i=j) matrix where the presence of pair wise ties are recorded as elements.
- Vector operations, blocking and partitioning, and matrix mathematics (inverses, transposes, addition, subtraction, multiplication and Boolean multiplication), are mathematical operations that are sometimes helpful to let us see certain things about the patterns of ties in social networks.
- Social network data are often multiplex (i.e. there are multiple kinds of ties among the actors).
- Once a pattern of social relations or ties among a set of actors has been represented in a formal way (graphs or matrices), we can define some important ideas about social structure in quite precise ways using mathematics for the definitions.
- In the remainder of the book, we will look at how social network analysts have formally translated some of the core concepts that social scientists use to describe social structures.
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- Social isolation occurs when members of a social species (like humans) have complete or near-complete lack of contact with society.
- Social isolation is usually imposed involuntary, not chosen.
- Social isolation can be dangerous because the vitality of individuals' social relationships affect their health.
- These effects are different from receiving direct support from a friend; instead, they are based on the ties that close social ties provide to more distant connections.
- Interpret why social isolation can be problematic for a person in society and the importance of social connections
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- Prestige refers to the reputation or esteem associated with one's position in society, which is closely tied to their social class.
- For example, prestige used to be associated with one's family name (ascribed status), but for most people in developed countries, prestige is now generally tied to one's occupation (achieved status).
- An individual's prestige is closely tied to their social class – the higher the prestige of an individual (through their occupation or, sometimes, their family name), the higher their social class.
- Prestige is often related to the other two indicators of social class - property and power.
- Prestige is a strong element in social mobility.
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- If all of your friends are nodes in your Facebook social network, how many of your connections are strong ties?
- How many are weak ties?
- Social networks are composed of nodes and ties.
- Ties are assessed in terms of strength.
- Strong ties, like family bonds are called strong ties.
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- Social network analysts use two kinds of tools from mathematics to represent information about patterns of ties among social actors: graphs and matrices.
- On this page, we we will learn enough about graphs to understand how to represent social network data.
- On the next page, we will look at matrix representations of social relations.
- With these tools in hand, we can understand most of the things that network analysts do with such data (for example, calculate precise measures of "relative density of ties").
- There is a lot more to these topics than we will cover here; mathematics has whole sub-fields devoted to "graph theory" and to "matrix algebra. " Social scientists have borrowed just a few things that they find helpful for describing and analyzing patterns of social relations.
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- Social network theory views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties.
- In its most simple form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied.
- These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines.
- More "open" networks, with many weak ties and social connections, are more likely to introduce new ideas and opportunities to their members than closed networks with many redundant ties.
- Power within organizations has also been found to be tied to social networks.
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- How are network roles and social roles different from network "sub-structures" as ways of describing social networks?
- Regularly equivalent actors have the same pattern of ties to the same kinds of other actors -- but not necessarily the same distances to all other actors, or ties to the same other actors.
- Think about some social role (e.g.
- "mother") what would you say are the kinds of ties with what other social roles that could be used to identify which persons in a population were "mothers" and which were not?
- Note the relational character of social roles -- one social role can only be defined with respect to others.
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- Most approaches to social positions define them relationally.
- The regular equivalence approach is important because it provides a method for identifying "roles" from the patterns of ties present in a network.
- Rather than relying on attributes of actors to define social roles and to understand how social roles give rise to patterns of interaction, regular equivalence analysis seeks to identify social roles by identifying regularities in the patterns of network ties -- whether or not the occupants of the roles have names for their positions.
- Regular equivalence analysis of a network then can be used to locate and define the nature of roles by their patterns of ties.
- The identification and definition of "roles" by the regular equivalence analysis of network data is possibly the most important intellectual development of social network analysis.
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- Actors who have more ties to other actors may be advantaged positions.
- If an actor receives many ties, they are often said to be prominent, or to have high prestige.
- That is, many other actors seek to direct ties to them, and this may indicate their importance.
- Recall Knoke's data on information exchanges among organizations operating in the social welfare field, shown in figure 10.1.
- Simply counting the number of in-ties and out-ties of the nodes suggests that certain actors are more "central" here (e.g. 2, 5, 7).
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- Some macro-structures are social agents (like voluntary and formal organizations); some macro-structures are categorical units (like gender and ethnic groups).
- To understand the "texture" of the "social fabric" we might want to index the extent to which these macro-structures "cluster" the interaction patterns of individuals who fall within them.
- The E-I (external - internal) index takes the number of ties of group members to outsiders, subtracts the number of ties to other group members, and divides by the total number of ties.
- The resulting index ranges from -1 (all ties are internal to the group) to +1 (all ties are external to the group).
- Next, we see the numbers of internal ties (14, or 22%) and external ties (50, or 78%) that yield a raw (not rescaled) E-I index of +.563.