Video: A Gentle Introduction to Network Analysis in R - a Peer Scholars Workshop, with Dr. Melissa Whatley

The dataset and PowerPoint for this workshop can be downloaded from https://github.com/NCSU-Libraries/peer-scholars-workshops.

The social world is full of entities that are connected to one another. People are connected to one another through friendships, the workplace, and neighborhoods. Places might be connected to one another through the people who frequent them or the moving of items from one location to another. These connections, or networks, have important consequences on outcomes such as how information is shared, diseases are spread, or people engage in particular activities.

This workshop offers a gentle introduction to network analysis, which is used to study relationships, whether among people, places, or other entities. Network analysis is a flexible analytical tool that can offer a fresh perspective on both quantitative and qualitative data. In this workshop, we will discuss the underlying theory and rationale behind network analysis, which identifies relationships, rather than independent, static actors as the unit of social analysis. We will discuss measures of centrality (degree, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector), which identify the most important units in a network, and also learn the basics of drawing networks using R software.

This video is a recording of A Gentle Introduction to Network Analysis in R, September 17, 2019