Social Network Theory
You are probably Facebook friends with your parents, even your grandparents. They “get” social networking. But the concept of social networks are considerably older than Mark Zuckerberg and go back to before even your oldest relatives were in diapers. Social networks emerged from a relatively obscure branch of 19th-century mathematics called graph theory that sought to understand the math of relationships. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1950s, psychologists, sociologists, and other social scientists used these mathematical developments to stop talking abstractly about social “structure” and began to collect actual data about the structures of individual people (nodes) having connections to each other based on friendship, communication, or membership (links). From these early developments, social network analysis has grown into an entire field of scholarship that
