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Social relations between people seldom follow regular lattice structures. In the Barabási–Albert model nodes link to the existing network structure with a probability proportional to the number of nodes previously attached. Here, we present an anthropologically motivated interpolation between Erdös–Rényi and Barabási–Albert rules, where people also prefer to help those who helped them in the past and explore some of its properties. The second part of the paper tackles the question how opinions spread through social networks. We restrict our analysis to one end of the spectrum: scale-free networks. We show for two different models how fast and how sustainable single individuals can influence an appreciable fraction of the population through social contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focus group interviews have become increasingly popular in the past three decades, but ethical issues related to conducting focus groups with participants who have preexisting power relationships in workplaces has received scant attention in the methodological qualitative literature. In this paper the authors offer three propositions to strengthen the moral geographical space between researchers and participants: (a) prior to data collection: highlight the risks and benefits of the method and stress that confidentiality cannot be assured outside the group; (b) during data collection: document group dynamics and encourage participants to share insights after the session; and (c) ongoing: researchers to research and write about the dynamics of the moral space between researcher-participant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the development of social network analysis, tracing its origins in classical sociology and its more recent formulation in social scientific and mathematical work. It is argued that the concept of social network provides a powerful model for social structure, and that a number of important formal methods of social network analysis can be discerned. Social network analysis has been used in studies of kinship structure, social mobility, science citations, contacts among members of deviant groups, corporate power, international trade exploitation, class structure, and many other areas. A review of the formal models proposed in graph theory, multidimensional scaling, and algebraic topology is followed by extended illustrations of social network analysis in the study of community structure and interlocking directorships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research on intransitive or unbalanced sentiment relations focused on the incidence of intransitivity in triads embedded in a larger social network. The theoretical explanations for in transitivity, however, are directed toward the attitudes and sentiments of an individual rather than toward the structure of triadic configurations and the global properties of groups. This paper argues that intransitivity should be studied at the individual level, with the person experiencing the intransitive relationship as the focus of attention. Analyzing longitudinal data on 2,175 intransitive sentiment triplets from fourth- and fifth-grade students, we show that individuals' personal characteristics and the structural properties of their dyadic and triadic ties affect both their tolerance for in transitivity and the manner in which they resolve intransitive friendships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]