SOCI248
Eun Kyong Shin
Email: [email protected]
Class Room: West Building 314B
Office hours: Wed 3:00-4:30PM
Table of Contents
Mon& Wed 4:30-5:45PM
TA**: Haesol Kim (**[email protected])
Office: West Building #119
Web: eunkyongshin.com
🫂 Human beings are a social species, not simply because we need other people to survive but precisely because the surrounding social environments shape the way we perceive, think, and behave. Social network analysis investigates the social world as a composition of social beings or units and depicts social organization and social structure in terms of patterned social relationships and links. This course is intended as a theoretical and methodological introduction to social network analysis and touches on both data collection and data analysis. Network analysis focuses on patterns of relations between social units–actors, organizations, places, events, etc. Both relations and actors can be defined in many ways, depending on the substantive area of inquiry. Social network analysis takes seriously the proposition that behaviors of individual units or actors are best to be understood in social context and hence leads to a relative analytic perspective. By introducing main themes and concepts in social network analysis, the purpose of this course is to provide links between quotidian vocabularies and sociological lexicons; this motivates students to analyze larger social processes and allows them to practice social network investigation in their daily lives. Assigned readings for each week provide a forum for discussion. Thus, it is required that you read all of the material for the course, before you come to class. Everyday life will serve as the empirical laboratory for class discussions.
📖 Readings can be found in book chapters or journal articles. For many of these you will be able to download the text from JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org) or another electronic full-text service. Photocopies of other assigned readings will be made available. We will be using R (https://www.r-project.org) and Gephi (https://gephi.org) for our analyses. They are free computer programs that you can download.