Levels of analysis

In general, social networks are self-organizing, emergent, and complex, such that a globally coherent pattern appears from the local interaction of the elements that make up the system. These patterns become more apparent as network size increases. However, a global network analysis of, for example, all interpersonal relationships in the world—or even one global region—is not feasible and is likely to contain so much information as to be uninformative. Thus, social networks are analyzed by the number and type of relationships relevant to the researcher's theoretical question. Such analyses can be delimited according to theory such that a specific set of persons whose relationships are to be analyzed fall within a specific scale or, again according to theory, may be targeted to analyzing specific types of relationships and be scale-free. Although levels of analysis are not necessarily mutually exclusive, there are three general levels into which networks may fall: micro-level, meso-level or middle-range, and macro-level. Read more