Lecture 8: Social Network Analysis SNA in Psychology Research

In addition to elaboration of SNA principal, this lecture gives us some SNA examples and introduced some research on psychology. SNA can reveal the most prolific and the most influential people, as well as those who are isolated or those who assume roles as mediators between others. So it can be used for research cognitive style and so on.


Paper [1] referred a theory of Small Groups as Complex Systems (hereafter SGCAS[4]). SGCAS comes from a social psychological heritage.And it limits its scope to small groups, i.e. less than 20 members within it. Now with the help of SNA, a large scale network can be researched.


There is an example: Analysis of characteristics of undergraduate students based on SNA[6].
The analysis is based on "interpersonal attraction"theory. And all the interpersonal attraction comes from interpersonal relations.In the research ucinet software was used to analyze the interactions. And the boundary of the research is a virtual learning community composed by 33 members in a university.The community includes 5 administrators, 27 members and 1 teacher.

The graph above is the network structure in the virtual learning community.In the research, there are several observations. There are two isolated nodes, node 23 and node 31. This shows that they may be need more help to join the community. Another observation is interesting: it seems that females are more likely to become the key members. The explanation in the paper is that females would like to gather and exchange information due to the natural properties. But I think this may be seen in a controversy way. The SNA results give out an evidence of affinity of females.  

Reference:
[1]Alistar Sutcliffe，Analysing Social Computing Requirements with Small Group Theory.
[2]H.Beyer and K.Holtzblatt,Contextual Design:Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San Francisco:Morgan Kaufmann,1998.
[3]J.E.McGrath,"Time,task and technology in work groups: The JEMCO workshop study".Small Group Research: special issue,vol.224,1993,pp.283-421
[4]H.Arrow,I.E.McGrath and I.L.Berdahl,Small Groups as Complex Systems:Formation,Coordination,Development and Adaptation.Thousand Oaks CA:Sage,2000.
[5]http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=_UhbhVvGeQQC&printsec=frontcover&hl=zh-CN&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
[6]Gao Lei, Analysis of characteristics of undergraduate students Based on SNA,IEEE