Week 6 blog post: SNA project

For my project, I would like to look at my personal relationships with people I know, such as people on Facebook and people I work with and see if any have had any problems with addiction. If they have, I would ask what kind and them ask them if they can name 5 other people that they know who have also had any addiction problems.

My goal is to see if our relationships with others are as closely related as we think they are. It would make sense that we spend a lot of our time with individuals who are similar to us. “If A and B are connected, there is a connection between B and C, it is likely there is a connection between B and C.”(Kadushin, 2012)

I would keep all names confidential and only ask about drugs and alcohol. In the article that I posted to hypothesis.is they also mentioned gambling, but my goal is just to focus on alcohol and drugs.

While I personally can’t think of any close friends that I have who have struggled with abuse, I am going to reach out to 10 people on Facebook that I know and ask them. I will tell them I am in a class and I am working on a project and ask if they would mind asking questions about substance abuse. While they are not going to be close friends, they are people I know.

If I can have 10 people I ask and if they can answer yes to knowing 5 other people I would have a small network of 50 people. If they cannot answer yes to knowing 5 other people, I would move onto the next person on my friend list and ask them the same question until I have found 10 people from Facebook who also know 5 other people. I would like to use a survey method to gather the data by just asking the basic questions of whether they have struggled of any substance abuse problems, if they answer no I would move onto the next person. If they answer yes I would ask if they know 5 other people who have also struggled with substance abuse problems.

I wanted to include this picture because it shows substance use among those with authoritative parents, which doesn’t relate to what I want to look at, but what I found was interesting was that there was a correlation between individuals and their friends who had authoritative parents. I think this relates to the idea that our friends have a lot of influence on us and our behaviors. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/1377497

I would use the edges as people and my nodes would be the connections between them. I want to see the similarities between alcohol abuse and drug abuse and which one individuals have struggled with more, and if the 5 people they know struggled with the same thing.


Node centrality in SNA

In Social Network Analysis, a node is important when looking at relationships in a network. There are different types of node centrality and they each look at relationships in a network. There is degree centrality, which looks at he degree with nodes and edges, betweenness centrality which looks at the path in networks, closeness centrality which is the distance between nodes and eigenvector centrality which is a measure of a node. (Robins, 2015) Each are important when looking at social network analysis and they have been used in a lot of research to look at relationships

In this picture, it shows the degree centrality and the Eigenvector centrality in Social network analysis. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24841789/how-to-find-degree-centrality-of-nodes-in-a-matrix

In the first journal article I chose to look at, they looked at node centrality with regards to social media. They looked at how people communicate with each other. In this case, they used mobile devices as the nodes. “If two nodes have more other acquaintances in common, they may have a higher probability of two people being acquainted.”(Shi, Chen & Gao, 2015) This makes sense; they would be closely related if they had acquaintances in common. We have people that we have a lot more contact with than others. Social network analysis is based on any relationships that we have with other people.

The other journal article looked at human contact in complex networks. I liked how they said, “in epidemiology, some possibly infective contacts between individuals are long term (friends, family) but many are fleeting.”(Hyoungshick & Anderson, 2012) This makes me think of relationships people have with each other. Some relationships are long term with people we have in our lives for a long time, and sometimes we have short-term relationships with people who maybe we knew but we don’t keep in contact with them anymore or we only knew them briefly. It is really interesting to see just how much node centrality is important in our relationships and just how important it is to social network analysis.


Robins, G. (2015). Doing social network research: network research design for social scientists. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Shi, Y., Chen, S., & Gao, Z. (2015). Measures of node centrality in mobile social networks. International Journal of modern physics, 26(9). doi:10.1142/S0129183115501077