Social network analysis is one of the most rapidly growing fields of the social sciences. Social network analysis focuses on the relationships that exist between individuals (or other units of analysis), such as friendship, advice, trust, or trade relationships. Network analysis is concerned with the visualization and analysis of network structures, as well as with the importance of networks for individuals’ propensities to adopt different behaviours. This seminar introduces the nwcommands, a software suite with over 90 Stata commands for social network analysis. The software includes commands (and dialog boxes) for importing, exporting, loading, saving, handling, manipulating, replacing, generating, visualizing, and animating networks. It also includes commands for measuring various properties of the networks and the individual nodes, for detecting network patterns and measuring the similarity of different networks, as well as advanced statistical techniques for network analysis.

This seminar is presented by Dr Thomas Grund, Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology at University College Dublin, Ireland and Visiting Simon Professor at the University of Manchester.

Before coming to Ireland he was Assistant Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University, Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Futures Studies and Stockholm University and post-doctoral fellow at ETH Zurich and Université de Montréal. He studied computer science and sociology at the University of Trier (Diplom), University of Cambridge (MPhil) and the University of Oxford (DPhil). His main research interests are the analysis of social and criminal networks.