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Social Science Issues

Social Network Analysis for Business

Social network analysis (SNA) is a methodology for studying social relationships and the flow of information, resources and status. Social scientists use SNA to understand how people’s social contact influences events. In a new study, researchers have mapped how “true believers” influence a social network.

SNA researcher Sameet Sreenivasan explains:

“As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change. People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbours, that wouldn’t change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10… There are clearly situations in which it helps to know how to efficiently spread some opinion or how to suppress a developing opinion. Some examples might be the need to quickly convince a town to move before a hurricane or spread new information on the prevention of disease in a rural village.”

Three social network clusters, shown as dots linked with lines to form three large balls of connections
“In this visualisation, we see the tipping point where minority opinion (shown in red) quickly becomes majority opinion. Over time, the minority opinion grows. Once the minority opinion reached 10 percent of the population, the network quickly changes as the minority opinion takes over the original majority opinion (shown in green).” Source: SCNARC/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Image & info: http://buff.ly/1hTjkVl