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October 5th 2015; 1pm BST – Session 2: Researching think-tanks with social network analysis with Jordan Tchilingirian (University of Cambridge)
Watch the session live below. If you were not on the Hangout, you can also participate by including comments in the section below or on Twitter using the hashtag #TTmethods.
We apologise for those who tried to watch it live. We had some IT issues and had to improvise -the video is from Enrique Mendizabal’s iPhone using UStream.
You can watch the webinars on Case studies, qualitative methods and diachronic perspectives and Quantitative Survey Analysis. And if you want, you can catch-up with the Pre-launch event held in London in August there is a video watch and a discussion paper to read.
Social network analysis (SNA) is the visualisation and measuring of relationships between a set of actors, be they computers, websites, cities, people, tribes, organisations and even think tanks. For many, the term is closely associated with social media. However, SNA is in fact a powerful tool which enables researchers to uncover important actors, discover coalitions, understand how resources (be they ideas, information, cash) move or are blocked, and even explore how diseases and technological innovations spread through a population.
This session look at how social network analysis can be applied to the political world and to public policy research. It starts by introducing the foundational concepts of social network analysis and the practical and ethical issues related to its research design. The focus then moves to the several innovative ways political scientists and sociologists have used SNA, which have delivered findings other methods might have missed. The session ends with a case study of how SNA has been employed in the study of British think-tank networks, in order to uncover potentially important actors in the process of policy-knowledge creation.
For more information on this method: Think-tanks and social network analysis
You can view the presentation here: