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Network Science in Psychology

Tracy Sweet, Selena Wang

Abstract

Social network analysis can answer research questions such as why or how individuals interact or form relationships and how those relationships impact other outcomes. Despite the breadth of methods available to address psychological research questions, social network analysis is not yet a standard practice in psychological research. To promote the use of social network analysis in psychological research, we present an overview of network methods, situating each method within the context of research studies and questions in psychology.

Network Science in Psychology

Abstract

Social network analysis can answer research questions such as why or how individuals interact or form relationships and how those relationships impact other outcomes. Despite the breadth of methods available to address psychological research questions, social network analysis is not yet a standard practice in psychological research. To promote the use of social network analysis in psychological research, we present an overview of network methods, situating each method within the context of research studies and questions in psychology.
Paper Structure (22 sections, 11 equations, 8 figures, 2 tables)

This paper contains 22 sections, 11 equations, 8 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Social Network Exploratory Methods
  3. Descriptive Statistics
  4. Community Detection
  5. Social Selection
  6. Social Selection Models
  7. Exponential Random Graph Models
  8. Latent Variable Network Models
  9. Stochastic Block Models
  10. Latent Space Models
  11. A Social Selection Example in Psychology
  12. Social Influence
  13. Social Influence Models
  14. A Social Influence Example in Educational Psychology
  15. Modeling Social Influence In Psychology
  16. ...and 7 more sections

Figures (8)

  • Figure 1: A visualization of the adjacency matrix; ties that are present are dark squares and absent ties are the light gray squares.
  • Figure 2: An example of a network with 7 individuals; the nodes are indicated by the vertices an the directed relationships are indicated by the arrows.
  • Figure 3: Example of network with subgroup structure; nodes are colored by subgroup membership
  • Figure 4: A. The network plots of two schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) study. The nodes represent students, colored by race (black, purple, pink, and orange represent race coded as Hispanic, White, Black, and Other respectively), and the edges represent friendship ties.
  • Figure 5: Hypothetical study network among college student shows network structure where nodes are colored by interest measured at the beginning(left) and end(right) of the course.
  • ...and 3 more figures