Tuesday, 7 February 2017
Centre Update and New Blog Address
The Centre for the Study of Behaviour Change and Influence has recently merged with the Bristol Leadership Centre, forming the new Bristol Leadership and Change Centre. This blog is therefore now closed, but you can follow us on the new blog here.
Friday, 8 April 2016
Fun, easy and popular the social practice way - Blog Post by Dr Fiona Spotswood
Fun, easy and popular
the social practice way
Amongst its critics, social marketing has been most often
castigated for relying too heavily on individualistic, downstream approaches to
social change. I would add to the list of criticisms – which include a lack of
rigorous evaluation, evidence, theoretical transparency, cost-effectiveness and
impact, that it is unwilling to embrace innovative theory from disciplines
other than psychology. However, I also argue that often social marketers have
understood the nub of a social problem without necessarily being able to
explain it in authoritative, theoretical terms. Like their commercial marketing
cousins, they have a good sense of what makes the world tick.
One example is the decade old social marketing mantra, ‘fun
easy and popular’. Not claimed to be grounded in any great theoretical tradition,
social marketers just had a sense that behaviour change interventions needed to
be fun, easy for people to do, and move people in the general direction of
travel within their cultural context, and not against it. “Start where people
are now”, I would be told by managers when I worked as a social marketing
consultant. “Find out what moves and motivates people”.
Rather than simply join the throngs willing to criticise
social marketing, this article aims to bolster social marketing’s kudos by
exploring ‘fun, easy, popular’ from a social practice perspective, thereby
adding theoretical scaffolding to an otherwise flimsy concept. Practice
theories have been gaining momentum in ‘behaviour change’, since a seminal
article by Reckwitz in 2002 reinvigorated our interest. The article revisited
the work of early practice theorists like Bourdieu and Giddens, which suffered
from obfuscate explanation, and pricked the ears of those seeking innovative
ways to understand and tackle the wicked problems of the day. In the sustainability
field, a practice theoretical perspective has now widely been acknowledged as
providing a potential framework for a conceptually advanced understanding of
the reason people act in environmentally unsound ways, for a way of intervening
in a full, holistic, naturally interdisciplinary way and, perhaps most
importantly, for a way of conceptualising societal problems which does not
automatically place individual behaviours at the heart of the problem, when a
complex context is at work in the background guiding decision makers down
pre-determined paths.
Practice theory comes from a sociological heritage and is
considered to be in its third wave now (Warde, 2014). Like all theory, it can
be used to draw certain phenomena into the foreground and de-emphasise others.
To understand its key tenets, the foreground in question must include a focus
on the practice itself and not the individuals who perform it. Life, so goes
the theory, is made up of practices, which are routinized, often unnoticed and
unconsidered, and which individuals perform every day. Examples are eating
breakfast, getting dressed, checking emails, making tea, having a shower. These
practices are made up of certain elements – competences (skills required to
perform them), meanings and materials. By understanding the elements which
interact which make up a practice, we can begin to see how a practice has
evolved. Being clean used to mean having a bath once a week, but now we shower
often twice a day. The materials have changed – we have electricity, hot
showers, bathrooms. The meanings have changed – being clean and fresh is a
cultural norm. The competences have changed – we no longer need to fill a tin
bath with kettles, but have to remember to turn on the extractor fan.
Practice theory also affords a great number of other
insights into the way action is organised. For example, practices compete with
each other to recruit participants; elements of practices are intertwined with
neighbouring practices so often individual practices cannot be singled out for
analysis; practices are unavoidable (there is nothing outside practices);
meanings and competences can be embedded in material things. The list goes on.
Perhaps the most important, however, is the way practice theory sidesteps the
thorny issue of structure vs agency which necessarily plagues behaviour change
thinking. If people are considered to have agency above all else, then
interventions which presume the power of their rational, goal-directed decision
making will result. If structure is considered a more important influence on
behaviour then activities to change the ‘wider determinants’ will result. In
truth, neither solution is complete and both quickly reach their natural
capacity.
In contrast, practice theory side-steps this conundrum.
Practices are structures which guide activity. We cannot shower without
engaging with the practice of showering and its constituent elements. However,
the practice only exists because it is being performed, and through performance
it can be reconstituted and recalibrated. This is how practices evolve.
Back to ‘fun’, ‘easy’ and ‘popular’, using ‘children eating
healthy snacks’ as an example.
Easy: The key relevant practices here are parental shopping
practices and family eating routines, although there are others such as food
preparation, storage, parents’ rewarding of children, TV watching (snack food
advertising practices) and so on. (And already the potential for
interdisciplinary, holistic perspectives afforded by practice theory rise to
the top).
A starting point is that practices must recruit
practitioners to survive and regenerate. Practitioners must have the relevant
competences to succeed, and if they do not (and a practice is therefore ‘hard’)
they will fail to re-perform the practice. If the competences are in place and
the practice is ‘easy’ to perform, then meanings will reflect this and a
practice will acquire the meaning of ‘easy’. Opening a packet of crisps is
‘easy’ (requires fewer competences) than peeling an apple.
Insights for intervention: Social marketing can have a role
in expanding the meanings around family food practices, for example working
with supermarkets to label fruit as ‘easy snacking’ and crisps/confectionary as
‘party food’. Competences can be hybridized into the material by providing
pre-prepared healthy foods for children’s snack times. There are problems,
however, with the mis-marketing of so-called ‘healthy’ snacks for children which
are high in sugar and other interventions will be required to tackle these
upstream problems. A sugar tax on snacks like the one slapped on fizzy drinks
today might have an impact, for example.
Popular: Practices are performed by communities of people,
who share a similar worldview (Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’). Within the same context,
people tend to perform the same practices in similar ways, although performance
will always vary a bit. People embody a sense of practical knowledge about how
to perform a practice (like eating meals three times a day) and what is the
‘right’ way of doing something (such as not eating curry for breakfast). This
practical knowledge is largely invisible to practitioners but highly visible
when someone is not conforming. Therefore, it is unrealistic to expect
practitioners to leap from one way of doing things (e.g. crisps in a lunch box)
to an alternative (fruit) without a more gentle evolution of the practice; so
it gets chance to become embodied. This interpretation of ‘popular’ is less
about social comparison and more about social order. There is a perceived ‘right’ way of doing things.
Related to this is that the more practitioners who perform a
practice, the more ‘normal’ it becomes and the harder it is to avoid. Again, a
gentle evolution is more likely to achieve this sense of ‘normal’ than sudden
or enforced changes.
Intervention implications: Social marketing has a potential role
here in preparing the way for practice evolution. Much like with the smoking
ban, which simply took the final step in an already strong march towards
practice change (Blue et al, 2016), social marketing activities can change
meanings and competences around snacking which contribute to an ‘natural’ evolution
in snacking practice. The role of materials is also important, and social
marketers can work with manufacturers, for example, to produce lunchboxes which
are attractive to children and parents and which afford (lend themselves
to/make it possible to) storing fruit and vegetable snacks more easily. Again,
such activities will compete with the thrust of much snack food industry
marketing, which presents snacking on refined and processed foods as a natural
phenomenon loaded with meanings around good parenting and motherly devotion. To
tackle the ferocity of these messages, it is likely that stronger regulation
would be required (Hastings and de Andrade, 2016).
Fun: In practice theoretical terms, ‘fun’ is considered
either as a meaning of the practice itself (a ‘teleoaffective structure’
(Schatzki, 2002), or as a mechanism which is ‘of the practice’ but embodied by
the practitioner. This depends on whether strong practice theory (aka Shove) or
a weaker version is in play. As a meaning, it is possible to see how social
marketing has a role in branding healthy snacks, whether manufactured (low
sugar cereal bars) or otherwise (satsumas) to provide a set of associations in
parents and children’s minds between the healthy snack and it being ‘fun’. This
is the heartland of marketing. If ‘fun’ is considered a mechanism embodied by
the practitioner, then further theoretical analysis is required (and there is
considerable room in practice theory for theoretical development (Warde,
2014)). However, the role of marketing in supporting the ‘fun’ meaning is
fairly straightforward.
Conclusion
‘Fun, easy and popular’ is an example of a mantra of early
social marketing that has led to its dismissal by ‘serious’ behaviour change
scholars who lambast its lack of theoretical rigor and downstream focus (see
Truong, 2014). Clearly the focus of ‘fun easy popular’ is the individual, but
examined from a practice perspective, it is possible to shift perspectives, and
even paradigms, and begin to see how a practice theoretical approach reframes
the problem (of, in this example, children’s unhealthy snacking) and considers
the contribution of materials, competences and meanings in the framing of
individuals’ (collective) performances. Social marketing can have a role in
intervening to change the links between elements and contribute to the
reformulation of practices which are problematic to society.
What is also clear from this brief analysis, however, is
that social marketing – within the commonly understood boundaries of the
discipline – cannot contribute straightforwardly to intervening to change the
materials of snacking practices (the production of unhealthy snackfoods
targeting children), nor have much effect on adjoining and clearly strongly
bundled practices, such as those of snackfood manufacturers and marketers. Here
we are entering the debate around ‘upstream social marketing’, which is much
discussed in the literature but of which there is little evidence (Truong,
2014). Lobbying, regulation and policy change are the interventions required at
this level, and a critical marketing understanding may be useful, but the
change agents are more likely to be policy makers, politicians and the
corporate sector itself.
A practice theoretical perspective offers huge potential for
social marketers to grapple in a more robust way with behaviour change by
removing the ‘behavioural’ aspect (the individual) and instead focusing on how
their particular skillset might contribute to interventions targeting practice
change. Social marketers have a natural sense of the ways the world works but
are not necessarily as adept at theoretical innovation as they need to be to
establish themselves as a valid and respected discipline within the behaviour
change community. Practice theory might therefore be a foothold for change;
both for social marketing as a discipline but also for many of the wicked
problems it seeks to address.
For further discussion please contact the author direct - Fiona2.spotswood@uwe.ac.uk
References:
Bourdieu, P.
(1985a) The genesis of the concepts of Habitus and of Field. Sociocriticism,
2 (2), 11-24.
Reckwitz, A. (2002), “Toward a theory of social practices: A
development in culturalist theorizing”, European Journal of
Social Theory, 5(2), 243-263.
Schatzki, T. (2002), The Site of the Social: A
Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change,
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Truong, V. D. (2014) Social Marketing: A Systematic Review of Research
1998–2012. Social Marketing Quarterly, 20(1),
15-34.
Warde, A.
(2014) After-taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice. Journal of Consumer Culture, November.
Thursday, 17 March 2016
The case for (good) harm reduction advice for recreational drug users - Blog post by Amy Beardmore
On 16th November 1995, school
girl Leah Betts died at her 18th birthday party. She and a friend –
like many 90’s teenagers - had decided to take ecstasy, a drug which they had
both taken before with no ill effects. Popular advice for ecstasy users at the
time was to drink plenty of water and to stay well hydrated to avoid
overheating, so when Leah started to feel unwell she followed that advice. Leah
continued to feel unwell, so, thinking she was dehydrated, she continued to
drink water. Unfortunately for Leah and her family this harm reduction advice was
misguided and her consumption of too much fluid led to the water intoxication
that ultimately killed her[i].
Leah’s death caused a moral panic and a media storm about
ecstasy, with many overlooking the actual cause of death and blaming the drug
itself. Bad advice and confusing messages were partly to blame for the actions
she took after ingesting the drug, and whilst Leah would undoubtedly have lived
had she not taken ecstasy that night, the popular harm reduction advice that
was in the public domain at the time was undoubtedly a contributing factor.
Since Leah’s death, what little official harm reduction advice
there is has been amended to reflect the dangers of both overheating and overhydrating:
‘Users
should take regular breaks from the dance floor to cool down and watch out
for any mates who are on it – they mightn’t realise they're in danger
of overheating or getting dehydrated…’
‘…However
drinking too much can also be dangerous…Users should sip no more than a pint of
water or non-alcoholic drink every hour.’
‘Ecstasy’, FRANK[ii]
With the rest of the ‘Ecstasy’ section of the FRANK website
emphasising either the associated illegalities or potential risks, it is clear that
there has actually been a shift away from harm reduction to prevention when it comes
to substance use education.[iii] Furthermore, the evidence seems to
suggest that despite many young people citing them as a source of information,
drug education initiatives such as the FRANK campaign fail to change behaviour.[iv]
 |
| A news report on the death of Leah Betts |
So what has happened to a ‘forewarned is forearmed’ approach
in the substance use agenda? Martin Barnes from Drugscope is concerned about
the lack of harm reduction knowledge among the current ecstasy-taking cohort:
“Much of that knowledge
[about reducing harm], for example, not increasing dosage and not allowing the
body to get over-heated is less known to many of the current generation of club
and festival goers. We need to find ways of reminding young people about this
type of information, not only in relation to ecstasy, but also to the many
other new drugs now available.”
Martin Barnes, quoted in the
Independent, August 2013[vi]
Both Harry Shapiro (also from Drugscope)
and Professor David Nutt (Imperial College) agree that there is a worrying
political shift away from harm reduction because the media have helped create
such a moral panic that the issue of substance use is now rooted in a culture
of fear rather than in providing effective and useful information to users.[vii]
Whilst harm reduction interventions such as needle exchanges and methadone
clinics are still used in the treatment of harder drugs, the ‘softer’
educational harm reduction approach and the associated safety benefits continue
to be overlooked due to the controversial, emotive and political nature of
substance use legislation.
 |
| 'Just say no' - FRANK campaign advert |
Current UK drugs policy has indeed seen a general shift
towards focusing on recovery and abstinence in recent years rather than on
damage limitation for substance users,[viii]
and the very mention of harm reduction as a tactic for tackling substance use
tends to send the more politically conservative into a moral spin as such
advice is seen to condone illegal and harmful activities. The “if you are going to do it, at least be
informed about it”[ix] approach to the so-called ‘war on drugs’
is frequently misinterpreted as condoning substance use, but if we accept that
prohibition has not eradicated these behaviours, the next logical step surely has
to be effective harm reduction advice. Moral panics and illegalities haven’t
stopped people taking ecstasy and other substances, so perhaps it is time to
educate people on how to stay safe, how to keep their friends safe, and on how
to reduce the potential harm involved in such activities. Settings in which
substance use tends to occur (such as festivals and nightclubs) should be free
to offer advice on safety without the fear of being seen to condone usage,
giving people the right information on how to manage dosage and dealing with any
associated concerns. Whilst we obviously don’t want to actively encourage drug
use, we do need to accept that certain behaviours exist in society, regardless
of whether they are either illegal or socially unacceptable.[ix] The challenge then shouldn’t be how we can
eradicate drug use, but how we can
ensure that harm reduction advice is freely available, easy for users to
understand and above all evidence-based; because the consequences of bad harm reduction advice can be as
devastating as having none at all.
[i] Henry,
J.A. (2000) Metabolic consequences of drug misuse. British Journal of Anaesthesia [online]. 85 (1), pp.136-142.
[iii] Measham, F.,
Williams, L. and Aldridge, J. (2011) Marriage, mortgage, motherhood: What
longitudinal studies can tell us about gender, drug ‘careers’ and the
normalisation of adult ‘recreational’ drug use. International Journal of
Drug Policy [online]. 22 (6),
pp.420-427.
[iv] Aldridge, J. (2008) A hard habit to break? A role for
substance use education in the new millennium. Health Education [online]. 108 (3), pp.185-188.
[vi]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fresh-fears-over-ecstasy-substitute-pma-after-rise-in-deaths-8787783.html
[vii]
http://www.mixmag.net/feature/ecstasy-in-2015
[ix]
Truss and White. (2010). Ethical Issues in Social Marketing. In: French, J. (2010) Social
Marketing and Public Health: Theory and Practice [online]. Oxford University Press.
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
How behaviour change can help with our ‘wicked problems’ - Dr Fiona Spotswood
Sadly, wicked problems like obesity and climate change aren’t going anywhere fast. As such,‘behaviour change’ has become a buzzword in academia and amongst policy makers. Research councils fund it, academics research it and policy makers do it.
But like all topics of social scrutiny, behaviour change is evolving. A mind map of key issues would include things like ‘interdisicplinarity’, ‘nudge’, ‘systems thinking’, ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘rigorous evaluation’.
Topics like these are the subject of discourse within centres which study behaviour change across the UK. There is no cohesive ‘field’ of behaviour change, but a disparate range of experts who continue to build a portfolio of evidence from their particular set of ideological, methodological and ontological perspectives.
No silver bullet
What fascinates me is bringing together the range of these perspectives from established experts across the spectrum of behaviour change approaches and considering the historical roots of political, legal and persuasive intervention, along with the ‘nudge’ craze and softer marketing based measures.
This inspired me to write Beyond behaviour change, as did the House of Lord’s Science and Technology Committee’s findings from their review of behaviour change; there is no silver bullet and approaches to behaviour change will be most effective if they are combined.
Unravelling problems
This has become the mantra of good practice now and is not news, but what is interesting for me is the way theory can help reconceptualise a wicked problem and unravel it to a point where interdisciplinary interventions can be implemented.
Untitled The Foresight Obesity Map Systems thinking is a good example; providing a way of illustrating the complexity and interrelationships between factors at varying ecological levels.
The Foresight Obesity map (shown right) is the most famous example: a simple glance demonstrates the sheer overwhelming magnitude of the problem of obesity. Surely interdiscipinarity has to be the answer.
Theoretically, however, I find social practice theory makes an even stronger contribution to reframing behaviour change and I am certain it will be (or at least I hope it will be) a backbone of work in the future.
Going back to the Foresight Obesity map, a clear fallout is that focusing behaviour change approaches on the individual will fail to make the impact that is required.
“practice theory does not seek to analyse the individual but rather the practice itself”
That is not to denigrate the fantastically rigorous evidence base unpicking the most effective combinations of individually-focused interventions, it is simply to argue that the need for a more systemic, holistic approach to complex wicked problems is a given. I think theories of practice have a lot to offer here.
In a nutshell, practice theory does not seek to analyse the individual but rather the practice itself, made up of elements in the form of competences, materials and meanings. Practices are treated as an ‘entity’ which are carried and performed by individuals.
Constituent practices
To understand a wicked problem, researchers disaggregate it into constituent practices – like that of snackfood eating, driving or watching television. We study the way the elements within the practice are linked, break, performed and reformed and how the practice has evolved and might be encouraged to evolve in a socially beneficial way.
The implications of practice theory are far reaching. For example, the approach stops the prevailing emphasis that the individual is always the ‘thing that has to change first’ to solve society’s problems.
It opens up a need for new ways of doing research and for policy makers to accept methodological and ontological variety. It implies interdisciplinarity because a multitude of solutions will naturally be required to tackle the links between elements.
“Regulation does not fit within the current neoliberal political climate, whereas interventions which require individual responsibility and self-management do”
With these implications come challenges, such as the emphasis in policy circles on positivist, traditional forms of research evidence – those that tend to consider the impact of various effects on an individual’s decision making. Also there is the problem of regulating business – surely a necessity if a practice theoretical analysis of practices involved in obesity, for example, is to be followed to its natural conclusion.
Regulation does not fit within the current neoliberal political climate, whereas interventions which require individual responsibility and self-management do. The abstract nature of SPT can be a challenge, too, and the lack of associated ‘toolkit’ for policy use. Undoubtedly academics and policy makers – in their two culturally alien worlds – need to work on how to improve communication of evidence and the applied usefulness of theory.
It is clear to me that the future cannot contain a continued focus on downstream interventions based solely on individualism, and that we must embrace a new paradigm which incorporates interdisciplinary, holistic thinking and methodological flexibility.
However, this call for paradigm shift and holistic thinking by no means represents a conclusion reached by all Beyond behaviour change’s contributors, and in fact the tensions between some of the chapters are an intriguing part of the story. The intention is not to force cohesion but to facilitate progress by providing a space for the consideration of diverse ideas, and most of all to encourage movement within the discourse. I invite readers to become part of this discourse around ‘behaviour change’ at this pivotal point in its history.
Beyond behaviour change: Key issues, interdisciplinary approaches and future directions is available to order here from the Policy Press website for £26.99. Tuesday, 2 February 2016
We are the rats - blog post by Dr Fiona Spotswood
“As
we set off for our run, a swarm of hi-viz sweeping down the pavement, most of
the group were attempting to avoid tripping over the feet in front whilst
peering and tapping at their wrists to start a heart rate watch or Garmin
tracker. All you can hear is ‘beep beep beep’ and the panting of runners whose
minds are not focused on avoiding the puddles but rather on their cosy post-run
analysis of each kilometre; armchair, recovery drink and commentary on which
bit was hard, where they improved and who they beat up which hill. It’s a new
kind of running” (research
field notes by the author). |
| Google Image |
Self-tracking devices are popular for amateur ‘leisure time’
runners, and underpin a set of activities which include data analysis, social
media sharing, comparison and goal-setting for improvement. ‘Wearable
technology’ is a growing area of technological development, offers market
potential and is ripe for research interest.
Working with Lukasz Piwek from Bath University, I am conducting a
piece of research which examines wearable technology from an innovative
perspective. Most research in this area – from a ‘behaviour change’ perspective
- is about whether or not self-tracking devices ‘work’ as a mechanism for
improving the self-regulation of physical activity or calorie intake. This fits
the bio-medical paradigm and also the ‘New Public Health’ emphasis on
individuals’ capacity to mitigate risk and take responsibility for their own
health. Within a neo-liberal political environment which fiercely protects the
market and supports individual responsibility above all else, this ‘healthist’
paradigm has supported a related burgeoning of consumerism, wherein the market
is continuously producing new ‘solutions’ to consumers’ ‘problems’ in the form
of wearable devices, technological platforms, social media, fitness apparel and
so on.
There is considerable literature critiquing the current focus on
self-responsibility in the public health and behaviour change arenas. One
theoretical platform for criticism is Foucault’s notion of governmentality. Governmentality emphasises that striving
for ‘perfect’ health involves intensive ‘work on the self’ or self-governance,
and despite the language of empowerment and freedom, this striving actually entails
compulsion, added responsibilities to others, and often punishment and social
exclusion in the case of those who fail to conform. The ‘panopticon’,
wherein prisoners are controlled both by the prison guards and the other
prisoners, is a useful metaphor.
 |
| The Panopticon |
Within the healthist paradigm,
individuals are both self-governing but also controlled by greater forces; health
has taken on a moral element, where those who fall short are in society’s
spotlight. Individuals
are ‘governed’ through the emphasis on self-responsibility, although not through coercion but through subtler measures. Through
the repeated emphasis from political and corporate agendas, individual ‘desires’
are aligned with those of the powerful. The market and government collude to
provide the structures to ‘help’ people maintain their health through
self-discipline and responsible citizenship.
What I’m getting at is that we are the rats
and the policymakers and corporations are the pied piper.
Taking responsibility for your own health is not a bad thing, per
se. But an emphasis on responsibility means we assume a lack of criticality
about the broader, bigger, bolder forces which shape society in which our
apparent ‘decision making’ takes place.
Researching
‘behaviour’ in a different way is a starting point for sharing in a fairer way the
focus of responsibility for ‘wicked problems’ between individuals and the
corporate giants. Theories of Social Practice can help us do this. Social theory has been introduced as a potential way of avoiding
the focus on individuals which is a characteristic of the predominant paradigm
of behaviour change policy and research. Individualistic focus is unrealistic
(how can an individual possibly seek to make decisions that are not influenced
by Coca Cola’s multi-billion dollar marketing budget), can lead to victim blaming
and leads to an avoidance of meaningful change (including regulation) on
largescale societal forces.
Rather
than focusing on the individual, the unit of analysis in theories of practice
is the practice itself, often usefully conceptualised as comprising three
elements – materials, meanings and competences. Practices are treated and
research as ‘entities’ in which individuals act as carriers and crossing points
of bundles of practices. Through their regular, routinized performance,
practices are sustained and evolve.
By using social practice theory to explore empirical findings about
how and why runners self-track using wearable technology, it is our intention
to unpick the whole entity of self-tracking practice and its bundle of interrelating
practices. Rather than thinking about self-tracking as a ‘health behaviour’,
which is a limiting concept because it presumes all ‘health outcome’ variables
lead to and come from individual responsibility and action, our research will
consider the meanings, materials and competences involved in self-tracking,
plus those of neighbouring practices such as club running, sharing, comparing
and analysing run data, setting goals for future training and so on. We will
attempt to conceptualise the practice as a whole, and use our findings to
critique existing portrayals of self-tracking as a way of ‘taking
responsibility for health’, a conceptualisation we suspect is too simplistic to
do justice to the complexity of practitioners’ performances, which might not
fit quite so neatly into traditional thinking about ‘health behaviours’ as the
pied pipers would have us believe.
Friday, 8 January 2016
Social Network Analysis- what does it mean? Blog post by our placement student, Francis Paynter
From a technical point of view, social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures through network and graph theories [1]. Essentially, it involves creating a colourful, if a little confusing at first, graph that is structured by nodes and edges. Nodes are individuals within a network and the edges are the relationships between the nodes that connect them. “Great and what does that mean?” I hear you say. Well with this information it is then possible to determine who within a network is important, in terms of information transfer, and who may be a little more peripheral, literally, within the network. It is used in several disciplines from the hard and soft sciences and most things in between. So it is evident that its practical applications could be far reaching from anything to mapping social media networks, friendship and acquaintance networks (great if you want to see how important or unimportant you are to your friendship group) and disease transmission.
To help visualise this there is a simple example of a kite graph below which is commonly used to explain social network analysis [2]:
So what does this mean… this is essentially a graph of who invited who to a party. We can see that Diane is the most central person for invites and has a degree of six as she is directly connected to six other people. If we were looking at this in terms of popularity it would be reasonable to say that Diane is the most popular because she has the most connections whilst Jane has only one direct connection and therefore, sadly for Jane, would be technically the least popular. However, Diane is not the be-all and end-all because if you take a look at Heather we can see she has a degree factor of three (connected directly to three other people). Whilst this is lower than Diane her position is still important. Therefore, if information needed to be conveyed to Ike, and by extension to Jane, this would not occur and Ike and Jane wouldn’t get an invite to the party… things aren’t looking good for Jane. But fortunately, Heather is there with her high betweeness centrality which in lay-person’s terms means she is important for connecting two groups of people together.
Having said this, demonstrating how popular someone is within a group is not that profound. However, when you think of the more complex graphs that can be produced with networks consisting of thousands of people its results can be a lot more useful for indicating influence and presence of smaller sub networks. Although social network analysis with a user-friendly programme such as NodeXL is in its relative infancy it is intriguing to see the range of ways in which it can be used to explore different kinds of networks.
For example, with NodeXL this can even be applied to social media platforms such as Twitter in order to explore how information is dispersed amongst follower-networks etc. This is especially relevant as social media use for businesses and individuals becomes all the more ubiquitous. The future of social network analysis with programmes such as NodeXL is an exciting and developing field for sure.
[1] Otte, E. and Rousseau, R., 2002. Social network analysis:
a powerful strategy, also for the information sciences. Journal of information Science,28(6),
pp.441-453.
[2] Hansen, D., Shneiderman, B. and Smith,
M.A., 2010. Analyzing social
media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world. Morgan
Kaufmann.
Tuesday, 22 December 2015
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