Applications of Social Network Analysis (SAGE Benchmarks in Social Research Methods)

Since its appearance in the 1930s in the form of sociometry, social network analysis (SNA) has become a major paradigm for social research in such areas as communication, organizations, and social mobility, to name but a few. It is used by researchers in a wide range of disciplines: like any mathematical approach to social research, social network analysis strips away the unique details of social situations to reveal, or model, the bare structural essentials. By doing so, it enables the researcher to identify similarities across widely disparate contexts, and so to benefit from the insights of many different fields of study. This major work is dedicated specifically to the applications of social network analysis in diverse fields of scholarship. Divided into four volumes, each of which opens with a contextualising introduction written by the editor, this collection aims to provide scholars from a wide range of disciplines with a comprehensive, touchstone resource on the topic.

Peter J. Carrington is Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Peter Carrington’s interest in social network analysis began with undergraduate study at Harvard in 1966, and continued with his graduate training at Toronto, where he was involved in the formation of the International Network for Social Network Analysis, published two papers on SNA, and wrote a dissertation using SNA to study intercorporate cooptation. He is co-editor with John Scott of the SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis (Sage, 2011), and co-editor with John Scott and Stanley Wasserman of Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2005), which was awarded the 2006 Harrison White Outstanding Book Award of the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. Since 2004 he has been the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice; he is also associate editor of Social Network Analysis and Mining, and a member of the editorial board of Criminal Justice Policy Review. He is currently involved in research on networks of criminal collaboration.