Kickstart your research with this practical, bestselling guide to doing social network analysis. Get to grips with the mathematical foundations and learn how to use software tools such as NeTDraw and UNICET to reach your research goals. Supporting you step-by-step through the entire research process, from design and data collection to coding, visualisation, and analysis, the book also offers: * Case studies and examples using real data * Exercises drawn from the authors' decades of teaching experience * Online access to datasets, worked examples and a software manual to help you practice your skills. Whether you are new to social network analysis or an experienced researcher, this approachable book is your technical toolbox and research companion all in one.
Kickstart your research with this practical, bestselling guide to doing social network analysis. Get to grips with the mathematical foundations and learn how to use software tools such as NeTDraw and UNICET to reach your research goals. Supporting you step-by-step through the entire research process, from design and data collection to coding, visualisation, and analysis, the book also offers: * Case studies and examples using real data * Exercises drawn from the authors' decades of teaching experience * Online access to datasets, worked examples and a software manual to help you practice your skills. Whether you are new to social network analysis or an experienced researcher, this approachable book is your technical toolbox and research companion all in one.
This approachable book introduces network research in R, walking you through every step of doing social network analysis. Drawing together research design, data collection and data analysis, it explains the core concepts of network analysis in a non-technical way. The book balances an easy to follow explanation of the theoretical and statistical foundations underpinning network analysis with practical guidance on key steps like data management, preparation and visualisation. With clarity and expert insight, it: * Discusses measures and techniques for analyzing social network data, including digital media * Explains a range of statistical models including QAP and ERGM, giving you the tools to approach different types of networks * Offers digital resources like practice datasets and worked examples that help you get to grips with R software
Talk is one of the main resources available to qualitative researchers. It offers rich, meaningful data that can provide real insights and new perspectives. But once you have the data how do you select an appropriate means of analysis? How do you ensure that the approach you adopt is the best for your project and your data? The book will help you choose strategies for qualitative analysis that best suit your research. It walks you through key decisions, provides actionable game plans and highlights the advantages and challenges of the main approaches. It is packed full of real examples designed to showcase the different tools you might use to meet your own objectives. Each section of the book focuses on one popular strategy for analyzing talk-based data: Narrative Analysis Conversation Analysis Discourse Analysis Taken together these sections will help you to fine-tune the link between your primary research question and your methods; to ensure that your theoretical stance fits with your methods; and to reason through your analysis in a way that will be recognizable to the intellectual communities of narrative, conversation, or discourse analysts. This book is both starting point and map for any social scientist looking to strategically and purposefully analyse talk data.
Talk is one of the main resources available to qualitative researchers. It offers rich, meaningful data that can provide real insights and new perspectives. But once you have the data how do you select an appropriate means of analysis? How do you ensure that the approach you adopt is the best for your project and your data? The book will help you choose strategies for qualitative analysis that best suit your research. It walks you through key decisions, provides actionable game plans and highlights the advantages and challenges of the main approaches. It is packed full of real examples designed to showcase the different tools you might use to meet your own objectives. Each section of the book focuses on one popular strategy for analyzing talk-based data: Narrative Analysis Conversation Analysis Discourse Analysis Taken together these sections will help you to fine-tune the link between your primary research question and your methods; to ensure that your theoretical stance fits with your methods; and to reason through your analysis in a way that will be recognizable to the intellectual communities of narrative, conversation, or discourse analysts. This book is both starting point and map for any social scientist looking to strategically and purposefully analyse talk data.
Choose the right methodological tools to answer your research question and know how to use them with this anthology of textual analysis approaches. Each chapter provides not only relevant theoretical background behind each methodology, but also its advantages and challenges, its potential applications, and its relationship to studying social phenomenon. Through step-by-step worked examples of real-world data, you get an in-depth window into each method in action and learn how to apply the same techniques successfully and confidently in your own research. Methods include: * Content analysis * Narrative analysis * Critical discourse studies * Multimodal discourse analysis
Choose the right methodological tools to answer your research question and know how to use them with this anthology of textual analysis approaches. Each chapter provides not only relevant theoretical background behind each methodology, but also its advantages and challenges, its potential applications, and its relationship to studying social phenomenon. Through step-by-step worked examples of real-world data, you get an in-depth window into each method in action and learn how to apply the same techniques successfully and confidently in your own research. Methods include: * Content analysis * Narrative analysis * Critical discourse studies * Multimodal discourse analysis
Anthony Giddens is widely recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the post-war period, but few works have placed his theory in the context of other theoretical positions and research traditions. Consequently, there is a vagueness about what is unique or different about Giddens' social theory. This volume guides the reader through Giddens' early attempts to overcome the duality of structure and agency. Giddens himself saw this duality as a major failing of social theories of modernity and his bid to solve the problem can be regarded as the key to the development of his trademark "structuration theory". The book investigates the ways in which Giddens' approach to agency and institutions draws on theorists such as Wittgenstein and Goffman, who failed to develop a "macro" approach to sociology. It then turns to his theory of modernity. Here the book examines themes which have become cornerstones of Giddens' later work: the transformation of modern intimacy and sexuality, and the fate of politics in late modern society. The text systematically relates Giddens' theoretical concepts to modern social theory, comparing and contrasting his work with major currents in this area, inclding the work of Habermas, Foucault, Bourdieu, Elias and Parsons, and with schools of thought such as feminism, ethnomethodology, Marxism, symbolic interactionism and postmodernism. The text incorporates insights from many different perspectives into Giddens' theory of structuration, his work on the formation of cultural identities, the dynamics of modernity and the fate of the nation-state.
Anthony Giddens is widely recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the post-war period, but few works have placed his theory in the context of other theoretical positions and research traditions. Consequently, there is a vagueness about what is unique or different about Giddens' social theory. This volume guides the reader through Giddens' early attempts to overcome the duality of structure and agency. Giddens himself saw this duality as a major failing of social theories of modernity and his bid to solve the problem can be regarded as the key to the development of his trademark "structuration theory". The book investigates the ways in which Giddens' approach to agency and institutions draws on theorists such as Wittgenstein and Goffman, who failed to develop a "macro" approach to sociology. It then turns to his theory of modernity. Here the book examines themes which have become cornerstones of Giddens' later work: the transformation of modern intimacy and sexuality, and the fate of politics in late modern society. The text systematically relates Giddens' theoretical concepts to modern social theory, comparing and contrasting his work with major currents in this area, inclding the work of Habermas, Foucault, Bourdieu, Elias and Parsons, and with schools of thought such as feminism, ethnomethodology, Marxism, symbolic interactionism and postmodernism. The text incorporates insights from many different perspectives into Giddens' theory of structuration, his work on the formation of cultural identities, the dynamics of modernity and the fate of the nation-state.
