Social networks are everywhere in modern society and network data can arise in many different research areas, e.g. online communities, social support, social movements and collective actions, collaboration among scholars or organizations.
Social networks consist of units (actors) with one or more relations (set of ties) observed among those units. This definition is extremely flexible and units and relationships linking them can be of different types (economic, political, emotional and so on).
Because of this pervasiveness, the number of methods and tools for Social Network Analysis (SNA) have grown rapidly in the last decades. SNA is a recent
methodological perspective for the study of networks, and it has four defining properties: 1) it involves the intuition that links among social actors are important; 2) it is based on the collection and analysis of data that record social relations that link actors; 3) it draws heavily on graphic imagery to reveal and display the patterning of those links; and 4) it develops mathematical and computational models to describe and explain those patterns.
The special issue of the Italian Journal of Applied Statistics on "Social Networks: Methods and Applications” aims to promote the use of statistical methods for the analysis of network data".
