“社会网络分析”(social network analysis)是西方社会学的一个重要分支 ,是国外从30年代末出现并 在最近20多年得到重要发展的研究社会结构的最新方法和技术 ,也是一种全新的社会科学研究范式。它是在英国著名人类学家 R.布朗对结构的关注中提出来的。但是,布朗所探讨的网络概念焦点在于文 化是如何规定了有界群体(如部落 、乡村等)内部成员的行为 ,而实际的人际交往行为要复杂得多。因此,为了深入理解布朗提出的“社会结构”概念, 从30年代到60年代, 在心理学(主要是移居美国的具有格式塔研究传统的德国社会科学家如K .勒温对群体结构的研究、J .莫雷诺开创的社会计量学研究以及F .海德对社会态度 、社会均衡的研究等)、社会学 、人类学以及数学(特别是欧拉开创的图论 、代数模型研究)、统计学、概率论研 究领域,越来越多的学者开始构建“社会结构”概念 ,认真思考社会生活的“网络结构”,各种网络概念纷至沓来, “社会网络”一词渐渐步入学术殿堂 。随后, 社会网络分析的理论 、方法和技术日益深入,成为一种重要的社会结构研究范式。

Social network analysis is explicitly interested in the relationships among social actors . Focusing on structural variables, it opens up a field of data analysis and model building which is completely different from conventional social statistical methods .Spanning nearly seventy years of research, statistical network analysis has witnessed three stages of models .Beginning from the late 1930s, the first generation of scholars (Moreno , Katz, Heider, etc .)studied the distribution of various network statistics. The second stage began from the 1970s and continued to the mid 1980s .It dealt primarily with exponential family of probability distributions for directed graphs (p1 model) under the vital assumption of “dyad independence” .Relaxing this assumption , Frank and Strauss (1986), Strauss and Ikeda (1990), Wasserman and Pattison (1996)published their pathbreaking papers based on Markov' s random graphs models (p＊ model and its generalization: logit p＊), which brought social network models to a new stage .It is an extremely flexible and complete model dealing with all sorts of structural aspects of social networks .This substantial “ real” structural research should be employed to examine the relational essence of Chinese society .

刘军；

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