Designing Empirical Social Networks Research

User-friendly guide to help design research about how and why social networks matter. Focused on political scientists with applications across the social sciences, this book will get researchers building a theory, designing a strategy to collect data, preparing the data for analyses, conducting preliminary analyses, and planning the next steps.

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A user-friendly introductory guide to the empirical study of social networks. Jennifer M. Larson presents the fundamentals of social networks in an intuition-forward way which guides theory-driven research design. Substantial attention is devoted to a framework for developing a network theory that will steer data collection to be maximally informative and minimally frustrating. Other features include: Coverage of a range of practical topics including selecting operationalizations, cutting survey costs, and cleaning data; A tutorial for getting started in analyzing networks in R; Technical sections full of examples, points to hone intuition, and practice problems with solutions. Designing Empirical Social Networks Research will be a valuable tool for advanced undergraduates, Ph.D. students in the social sciences, especially political science, and researchers across the social sciences who are new to the study of networks.