# 7.S: Connection (Summary)


There is a great deal of information about both individuals and the population in a single adjacency matrix. In this chapter you have learned a lot of terminology for describing the connections and distances between actors, and for whole populations.

One focus in basic network analysis is on the immediate neighborhood of each actor: the dyads and triads in which they are involved. The degree of an actor, and the in-degree and out-degree (if the data are directed) tell us about the extent to which an actor may be constrained by, or constrain others. The extent to which an actor can reach others in the network may be useful in describing an actor's opportunity structure. We have also seen that it is possible to describe "types" of actors who may form groups or strata on the basis of their places in opportunity structure - e.g. "isolates", "sources", etc.

Most of the time and effort of most social actors is spent in very local contexts - interacting in dyads and triads. In looking at the connections of actors, we have suggested that the degree of "reciprocity" and "balance" and "transitivity" in relations can be regarded as important indictors of the stability and institutionalization (that is, the extent to which relations are taken for granted and are norm governed) of actor's positions in social networks.

The local connections of actors are important for understanding the social behavior of the whole population, as well as for understanding each individual. The size of the network, its density, whether all actors are reachable by all others (i.e. is the whole population connected, or are there multiple components?), whether ties tend to be reciprocal or transitive, and all the other properties that we examined for individual connections are meaningful in describing the whole population. Both the typical levels of characteristics (e.g. the mean degree of points), and the amount of diversity in characteristics (e.g. the variance in the degree of points) may be important in explaining macro behavior. Populations with high density respond differently to challenges from the environment than those with low density; populations with greater diversity in individual densities may be more likely to develop stable social differentiation and stratification.

In this chapter we also examined some properties of individual's embeddedness and of whole networks that look at the broader, rather than the local, neighborhoods of actors. A set of specialized terminology was introduced to describe the distances between pairs of actors: walks, trails, and paths. We noted that there are some important differences between undirected and directed data in applying these ideas of distance.

One of the most common and important approaches to indexing the distances between actors is the geodesic. The geodesic is useful for describing the minimum distance between actors. The geodesic distances between pairs of actors is the most commonly used measure of closeness. The average geodesic distance for an actor to all others, the variation in these distances, and the number of geodesic distances to other actors may all describe important similarities and differences between actors in how, and how closely, they are connected to their entire population.

The geodesic distance, however, examines only a single connection between a pair of actors (or, in some cases several, if there are multiple geodesics connecting them). Sometimes the sum of all connections between actors, rather than the shortest connection may be relevant. We have examined approaches to measuring the vulnerability of the connection between actors by looking at the number of geodesic connections between pairs of actors, and the total number of pathways between pairs of actors.

We have seen that there is a great deal of information available in fairly simple examinations of an adjacency matrix. Life, of course, can get more complicated. We could have multiple layers, or multiplex data; we could have data that gave information on the strength of ties, rather than simple presence or absence. Nonetheless, the methods that we've used here will usually give you a pretty good grasp of what is going on in more complicated data.

Now that you have a pretty good grasp of the basics of connection and distance, you are ready to use these ideas to build some concepts and methods for describing somewhat more complicated aspects of the network structures of populations. In the next two chapters, we will focus on ways of examining the local neighborhoods of actors. In Chapter 8, we will look at methods for summarizing the entire graph in terms of the kinds of connections that individuals have to their neighbors. In Chapter 9, we'll examine actors' local neighborhoods from their own individual perspective.

This page titled 7.S: Connection (Summary) is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Robert Hanneman & Mark Riddle.