5.3 UCINET

“UCINET 6 for Windows is a software package for the analysis of social network data. […] It comes with the NetDraw visualization tool” (https://sites.google.com/site/ucinetsoftware/home) and can be downloaded from https://sites.google.com/site/ucinetsoftware/downloads. A German and an English user’s manual are published at http://www.methoden-der-ethnographie.de/heft1/nwaKoch.html and https://sites.google.com/site/ucinetsoftware/document respectively. Both offer detailed descriptions of how the program works. The UCINET software homepage offers an e-mail support, a link to Introduction to social network methods by Robert A. Hanneman and Mark Riddle which is also recommended for further reading by Clark and Trousdale, and references to social network analysis books. Therefore, the software package UCINET and its homepage are good starting points for beginners in the field of social network research.

The software package is used to conduct formal social network analyses and allows the user to process a large amount of data which can be evaluated in many different ways. With UCINET it is possible to define each individual’s position within a given community’s social hierarchy. Furthermore, it allows the users to determine their identities and individual profiles (cf. different network dimensions in the social network questionnaire).

However, once the social network is visualized, the sociogram does not give evidence as to whether or not the constructed ties between the informants are actually performed in (significant) communication. In the case of the pipe band, for instance, the constructed social network is based on the subjective perception of each informant, which cannot be considered generally valid. Even if many different perceptions are gathered, there is always a slight chance that these are distorted due to the effects of some observation or judgment bias (cf. Fetterman 1998). Furthermore, it must always be kept in mind that sociograms display only snap-shots. Social structures change continuously so that only various sociograms generated at different points in time can show developments of social structures over time (cf. Weyer et al. 2011: 109-132).

For a short introduction on how to use UCINET click here.

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