Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
The basic insight of social network analysis is that social structure is an emergent property of the networks of relationships in which individuals (and other social actors, such as organizations) are embedded (Simmel [1922] 1955; Radcliffe-Brown 1940). Therefore, if one wants to understand social structure, one should study social networks. While research on social networks may use quantitative or qualitative or mixed methods, social network analysis itself is fundamentally neither quantitative nor qualitative, nor a combination of the two. Rather, it is structural. That is to say, the basic interest of social network analysis is to understand social structure, by studying social networks. Observing or calculating quantitative aspects of social networks, such as the average number of individuals with whom an individual is directly connected, or qualitative aspects, such as the nature of social ties among individuals, can be useful analytic techniques, but the fundamental quest is to understand the structure of the network, which is neither a quantity nor a quality.
As it has developed, social network analysis has become increasingly mathematical: That is, it employs formalisms and analytic techniques taken from mathematics and developed further for social network analysis by mathematicians. Many people think of social network analysis as primarily a quantitative approach to social science, because they mistakenly equate “quantitative” and “mathematical.” But, as Harrison White (1963a:79) pointed out, “Mathematics has grown much ‘beyond’ quantity...,” and the branch of mathematics principally used by social network analysis – graph theory – represents structures (or the lack thereof), not quantities. The same point was made much earlier by Radcliffe-Brown (1957), in his lecture series given at the University of Chicago in 1937:
Relational analysis, even if not metrical, may be mathematical, in the sense that it will apply non-quantitative, relational mathematics. The kind of mathematics which will be required ultimately for a full development of the science of society will not be metrical, but will be that hitherto comparatively neglected branch of mathematics, the calculus of relations, which, I think, is on the whole more fundamental than quantitative mathematics.
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