Social Network Analysis and Education

Author

LASER Institute

Published

July 20, 2024

The culminating activity for the SNA Modules is designed to provide you some space for independent analysis of a self-identified data source, ideally data that you have collected yourself. To earn your SNA Microcredential, you are required to demonstrate your ability to formulate a basic research question appropriate to a social network context, wrangle and analyze relational data, and communicate key findings. Your primary goal for this analysis is to create a data product that illustrates your findings and demonstrates your ability to apply the knowledge and skills acquired from the essential readings and case studies.

  1. Identify a data source. For your SNA microcredential, you are required to identify your own network data source related to an area of professional interest. This may be data that you have already collected prior to the LASER Institute, or data that you may be interested in working with for a future study, such data from online discussion forums or from a social networking site.

  2. Formulate a question. I recommend keeping this simple and limiting to no more than one or two questions. Your question(s) should be appropriate to your data set and ideally be answered by applying concepts and skills from our essential readings and case studies. For example, you may be interested in descriptively comparing two networks, identifying key actors or groups in a network, or examining actor-level attributes that predict tie between individuals in a network.

  3. Analyze the data. Create a new R/Python script to use as you work through data wrangling and analysis. Your R/Python script will likely contain code that doesn’t make it into your final data product since you will experiment with different approaches and figure out code that works and code that does not.

  4. Create a data product. When you feel you’ve wrangled and analyzed the data to your satisfaction, create a Quarto document that includes, at minimum, a polished sociogram and a data table along with a narrative highlighting your research question, data source, analysis approach, key findings and their implications for understanding or improving the educational context of study. Be sure that your Quarto document includes all code necessary to read, wrangle, and explore your data; and equally important, demonstrates how someone could potentially reproduce your findings.

  5. Share your findings. Render your data product to a desired output format. This may be a simple HTMLwebpage or Presentation, a PDF or Word file, a manuscript or even a Dashboard. When you’re ready to share your analysis, export your file (e.g., Word or PDF) or publish your HTML based data product using one of several popular services such as Quarto Pub, GitHub Pages, Posit Cloud or Netlify.

To receive your SNA microcredential, you will need to provide your instructor a file of your final product or link to your online webpage. After they have reviewed your work, you will be provided a physical or digital version of the microcredential pictured at the top of this document!

If you have any questions about this microcredential, or run into any technical issues, don’t hesitate to contact your instructor.