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"How do we interact with people in our everyday life? Who are the people we are connected to? What are the consequences of overlapping social circles and how people deal with the potential emerging conflicts? What are the structural and cultural mechanisms that regulate social worlds? Network science is a scientific approach to the study of network dependencies and associations which tries to answer these and many other questions. This book explores the underlying mechanisms that regulate social life as they are produced, reproduced, modified, and abandoned in the spatial and temporal patterns of interactions. The mixed methods approach, that combines formal network analysis with qualitative materials and statistical tools, shows the importance of contextualising structural mechanisms in their social and cultural environment, and allows overcoming the traditional methodological boundaries that shape the field of social sciences"--

How do we interact with people in our everyday life? Who are the people we are connected to? What are the consequences of overlapping social circles and how people deal with the potential emerging conflicts? What are the structural and cultural mechanisms that regulate social worlds? Network science is a scientific approach to the study of network dependencies and associations which tries to answer these and many other questions. This book explores the underlying mechanisms that regulate social life as they are produced, reproduced, modified, and abandoned in the spatial and temporal patterns

One of the most powerful aspects of social network data is the fact that they can reproduce social relationships in a formal and comparable way. Relational matrices abstract from the hustle and bustle of everyday interaction, and systematise information in terms of presence or absence of ties expressing them in a directed or undirected, binary or valued form. While the formal approach represents an advantage of social network analysis, as it allows bracketing off the idiosyncratic and subjective content of social structures, the mathematization of the complex nature of social relationships has also been criticised for the lack of engagement with the subjective meaning and context of relationships. Such stream of critique has called for an increase of use of qualitative methods in social network research. The first goal of the paper is to address these critiques by rebalancing the argument and showing how social network analysis has always engaged with both formal and contextual aspects of social structures. The paper reviews some theoretical perspectives that discuss and systematise a mixed method approach, and explores the methodological advantages of using network visualizations together with qualitative interviews in the collection, analysis and interpretation of personal networks. The advantages of adopting a mixed method approach are illustrated over some examples of friendship networks of 23 single male and female people collected in Milan, Italy, in 2005. A classic name generator is used to reconstruct their egonets of friends, and the visualization is adopted as the input for in-depth interviews with specific attention devoted to the meaning of friendship relationships, the kind of resources they offer, the conflicts and constrains they entail, and how they have developed and evolved over time. By comparing information obtained respectively with name generators and in-depth interviews, the paper shows how the mix of data improves and specify the understanding of personal networks.

Much of the work in the sociology of science observes scientific communities from a micro perspective, focusing on interactions in laboratories in order to uncover the impact of social and cultural norms in the everyday production of scientific results. Other studies approach the topic from a macro perspective, analysing scientific organizations and the reciprocal influence they have with wider society, or uncovering the invisible colleges that become apparent through the analysis of co-authorship and citations' patterns. Less attention has been paid to the meso level of interaction within and between scientists and the institutions they work in. This paper extends the structural approach of Lazega et al. (2008. Catching up with big fish in the big pond? Multi-level network analysis through linked design. Social Networks 30, 157-176) and analyses the local system of public funding to physics in Italy using bipartite networks. Data cover 10 years of funding of Projects of National Interest (Prin) from the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The micro level (collaborations between scientists), macro level (collaborations between institutions) and meso level (the combination of network measures at a micro and macro level) of interactions are independently analysed, and results are used to model the total amount of money physicists have received over the 10 years against the variables that meaningfully describe the network structure of collaborations. Results show that in order to be successfully funded what counts more than being a big fish (a scientist with a lot of connections) working in a big pond (a large University), is being in a brokerage position interacting over the years with different research groups. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

The paper presents the results of a qualitative research on friendship networks of single people. The research has been undertaken using social network analysis tools (egonetworks) and qualitative interviews, on a non-representative sample of 23 heterosexual singles of Milan, aged between 25 and 35 years, 12 male and 11 female. Framed within the theory of community, we formulated some questions that are addressed through the analysis: the role of friendship in single people's everyday life, which in some cases substitutes the traditional family as a source of emotional, social, material and economical support; the possibility that friendship is not always intended as a source of support, and people can name friends even if they do not provide any kind of support; the effect of the network structure on the strength of dyads, that will easily disconnect if not embedded in a cohesive network. Four different kinds of friendship networks have been found: the small cliques, the company, the core/periphery structure, and the contextualised components. In the discussion section, empirical findings are analysed focusing on different strategies of friendship, and special attention is given to the gender issue. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In general, the literature about social support networks (SSNs) has been divided into two different statements: On the one hand, social support is a safety net that helps the ego confront disadvantages in life. On the other hand, studies have shown how SSNs could act as sources of constraints for ego, especially in poverty. In this study, we looked into the SSNs of older people over time and found how those two paths co‐exist and depend on the socioeconomic status of ego. Then, this article aims to discover how cumulative social inequalities intersect with social networks in facilitating or hampering social support over time, impacting retirement experience. Specifically, we want to observe if and how the life trajectories of older people from different socioeconomic statuses affect how people build their SSNs in terms of structure and composition. This article presents a mixed‐method project that collected qualitative life history interviews from 30 older women and men in Santiago, Chile. The results show that socioeconomic status plays a role in shaping individual experiences of retirement but that these experiences are shaped through SSNs structural and compositional characteristics. People identify salient life events and the relevant networks and conjointly discuss supportive and/or exploitative aspects of their networks. The amount of support they give to others or that they receive from their alters accumulates over time, resulting in a progressive social inclusion or exclusion mechanism. This article concludes that SSNs during retirement are shaped by the ego's socioeconomic status and life history.

Social networks are usually considered as positive sources of social support, a role which has been extensively studied in the context of domestic violence. To victims of abuse, social networks often provide initial emotional and practical help as well useful information ahead of formal institutions. Recently, however, attention has been paid to the negative responses of social networks. In this article, we advance the theoretical debate on social networks as a source of social support by moving beyond the distinction between positive and negative ties. We do so by proposing the concepts of relational ambivalence and consistency, which describe the interactive processes by which people, intentionally or inadvertently, disregard - or align with - each other's role‐relational expectations, therefore undermining - or reinforcing - individual's choices of action. We analyse the qualitative accounts of 19 female victims of domestic violence in Sweden, who described the responses of their personal networks during and after the abuse. We observe how the relationships embedded in these networks were described in ambivalent and consistent terms, and how they played a role in supporting or undermining women in reframing their loving relationships as abusive; in accounting or dismissing perpetrators' responsibilities for the abuse; in relieving women from role‐expectations and obligations or in burdening them with further responsibilities; and in supporting or challenging their pathways out of domestic abuse. Our analysis suggests that social isolation cannot be considered a simple result of a lack of support but of the complex dynamics in which support is offered and accepted or withdrawn and refused.

Abstract
This brief article illustrates the features of ScriptNet, a software package that facilitates a visual analysis of the organisational aspects of criminal enterprise, together with a visual analysis of the network of people, organisations, places and resources that are in some way involved in the commissioning of these goal-oriented crimes. ScriptNet is an amalgamation of the terms 'script' and 'network' that in turn represent two analytical approaches to understanding criminal and social behaviours. Script refers to crime script analysis, an analytical technique that organises knowledge about the procedural aspects and procedural requirements of the crime commission process. Network derives from social network analysis, and specifically from the framework of multi-mode and multi-link networks, which maps individual and collective actors, together with resources they can access and places where they are located, and the various types of relationships that may link them. In this article we illustrate the functions and features of ScriptNet using data provided by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI). We discuss the innovative aspects of ScriptNet and we identify its limits. In its current format, ScriptNet has been developed as proof of concept. The code is open source, and we welcome people to collaborate and implement new and improved functions.