The ego-net approach to social network analysis, which takes discrete individual actors and their contacts as its starting point, is one of the most widely used approaches in the field. This is the first textbook to take readers through each stage of ego-net research, from conception, through research design and data gathering to analysis.
It starts with the basics, assuming no prior knowledge of social network analysis, but then moves on to introduce cutting edge innovations, covering both new statistical approaches to ego-net analysis and also the most recent thinking on mixing methods (quantitative and qualitative) to achieve depth and rigour. It is an absolute must for anybody wishing to explore the importance of networks.
Table of Content
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Social Capital and Small Worlds – A Primer
Chapter 3: Getting Ego-Nets
Chapter 4: Analysing Ego-Net Data
Chapter 5: Narratives, Typologies and Case Studies
Chapter 6: Multilevel Models for Cross-Sectional Ego-Nets
Chapter 7: Statistical Analysis of Network Dynamics
About the author
Dr. Johan Koskinen is a senior lecturer in social network analysis in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. He has previously worked at the Universities of Manchester, Oxford, and Stockholm. A statistician by training he has primarily made methodological contributions to the analysis of cross-sectional and dynamic network data and been published in Annals of Applied Statistics, Psychometrika, and Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, among others. He has also facilitated methodologically innovative research with a substantive focus that has been published in journals such as Quantitate Criminology, European Sociological Review, and Social Networks. Dr. Koskinen has been active in disseminating current best methods through frequent training and books such as the award-winning book on exponential random graph models.