How to Study Online Networking

Abstract

Social media and social networks are pervasive in the daily use as well as in a number of applications. Social media and social networks are also intertwined, as the social medial platforms also offer the opportunity to develop and analyze social networks. Over the past two decades, there has been an explosion of interest in network research through social network analysis. Network research is “warm” today, with the number of articles on the topic of social media and social networks nearly tripling in the past decade. This interweaving has been a further breakthrough within field research yielding explanations for social phenomena in a wide variety of new ways. Social network analysis (SNA) has been recognized as a powerful tool for representing social network structures and information dissemination on the web. Here, the authors review the kinds of things that sociologists have tried to explain using social network analysis and provide a nutshell description of the basic assumptions, goals, and explanatory mechanisms prevalent in the field, with emphasis on SNA research methodology.