Qualitative Networks: Mixed methods in sociological research [Paperback]

How do we interact with people in our everyday life? Who are the people we are connected to? What are the consequences of overlapping social circles and how people deal with the potential emerging conflicts? What are the structural and cultural mechanisms that regulate social worlds? Network science is a scientific approach to the study of network dependencies and associations which tries to answer these and many other questions. This book explores the underlying mechanisms that regulate social life as they are produced, reproduced, modified, and abandoned in the spatial and temporal patterns of interactions. The mixed methods approach, that combines formal network analysis with qualitative materials and statistical tools, shows the importance of contextualising structural mechanisms in their social and cultural environment, and allows overcoming the traditional methodological boundaries that shape the field of social sciences.

1. Introduction  2. Paradigm War and the Roots of Social Networks  3. The Constitutive Bricks of Qualitative Networks: Actors, relations, networks  4. Talking Ties: Micro processess of local structures in friendship networks  5. Ethnography of Overlapping Networks: Resource exchange in street groups  6. Scientific Communities: Describing social worlds in research collaborations  7. Coda

Social Network Analysis is a research approach widely used in many disciplines ranging from physics to the social sciences. Qualitative Networks offers an insight on how to mix this perspective with qualitative methods, and in so doing enables us to investigate the forms and meanings of the networks of relationships in which people are embedded.

Elisa Bellotti is lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester and a member of the Mitchell Centre for Social Netwl£;