Customer Reviews

Social Network Analysis: A Handbook

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a biostatistician interested in learning some social network analysis, I was immediately attracted to this book. It is short and non-technical and seemed to provide an overview of the key issues in this research area. Once I began to read it, I quickly saw that Scott has a gift for presenting complex idea in clear prose. (I don't know quite why it is, but British academics are typically very good at expository prose.) In any case, Social Network Analysis provided just what I wanted -- a quick (180 page) overview that will help me move on to other, more technical works in this area.
Bravo!

This truly is a handbook for researchers, in being a very short and thorough reference. However, I wouldn't recommend it for someone just learning network theory on their own. The author is often more interested in giving formalized definitions, terms, and examples than ensuring the reader understands the basic concepts of SNA. It reads like a legal or engineering document, more than an introductory guide. That's probably good for economy or business students, but not to an anthropologist like me. The other two books that are recommended by Amazon to buy along with this one both offer the same information, but they also do it in a way that is more readable if you want to actually do SNA. The concepts of SNA are very simple, yet the author does his best to make them sound more complex or esoteric than they are. The book is just fine, but the 3-stars is a comparison of the other into works out there, and my experience reading dozens of articles on the subject.

This book is intended as an introduction to the field and no prior knowledge of social network analysis is required. Although less than 200 pages, the text contains a lot of useful information. The best thing about the book is that the author doesn't just tell us about SNA as it stands today, but instead discusses how the ideas behind the theory kept changing while citing the most important papers published about the subject. The only criticism that I have is that in some cases the author used diagrams to illustrate simple points, but when he was discussing some of the more complicated issues like algorithms there were no diagrams that accompanied the explanation, and this made it harder to follow. This only happened in the last two chapters, but other than that, I really recommend this book to anyone with even the slightest interest in social network analysis.

It's the best book I've read on the subject. It's clear and wide. It could be understad as a theorical context for Faust and Wasserman book: Social Network Analisys.

In looking to utilize the information in health care, I found John Scott's book to be quite informative and action oriented. It will definetly serve us well. The

I haven't read all of the book yet but what I have read, I have found valuable. Rather than find all of the original cites and such in articles, Scott has a lot of the info in one place.