Varieties of Networks and Their Characteristics

Varieties Of Networks And Their Characteristics

We have provided many examples of networks in the previous chapters. Some of them being generated artificially, these networks have quite different structural features. At the same time, while defining many structural measures, we have talked about how to or how not to use them for comparing different networks. In real social networks, many structural features have similarities. Within the scope of this chapter, we will examine some similarities encountered during contemporary field studies. We will also look at the interpretations of differences.

Social scientists are not the only ones dealing with networks. Physicists and biologists are also interested in the subject. Non-social issues such as attractive interactions among protein molecules and their impact on protein folding, networks of enzyme or gene interaction might be analyzed using graphs, an abstract mathematical concept suitable for representing relational structure of all these networks. Therefore, social and non-social network studies show certain parallelisms and make use of common mathematical methods and criteria (Borgatti et al. 2009; Lazer et al. 2009). However, significant variations arise from time to time due to the dissimilarity of phenomena. Indeed, complex and dynamic nature of social systems may require certain extensions to basic graph representation, such as for representation of temporality.

Can the structure of human social groups, as it is the case for natural/biological phenomena, be the reflection of the basic behavioral features? Jacques Monod, a natural scientist, gives the example of snowflakes and discusses how all of them differ from one another while showing the features of their main component (i.e. the water molecules) (Monod 1997). While this view may lean towards somewhat mechanistic determinism, it is useful in exploring how complexity of a whole emerges from the nature of its components. In a similar vein, Moreno notes that he looks for the universal features of human communities in his studies (Moreno, 1934). Do social groups bear similarities? To what extent they are similar? Can the same mathematical models represent variations as different as snowflakes and social systems? What are the reasons and meaning of differences in the social patterns?

Like the relationships forming them, social networks also display remarkable variety. For that reason, social network research approaches similarities and dissimilarities in a different way than that of natural sciences. We have explored the basic types of graphs and exemplified the types of social networks they can represent, in earlier chapters. In this chapter we will extend this exploration and give examples of more rich graph representations that are used in representing contemporary empirical data encountered in social network research.