Session «Mixed Methods in Network Analysis» at the conference «Networks in the Global World» in St. Petersburg: call for participation

The members of ANR-Lab and LCSR HSE will organize the session «Mixed Methods in Network Analysis» at the conference"Networks in the global world", which will take place on July 4 – 6, 2018 in St. Petersburg. 

The conference"Networks in the global world. Patterns of complexity in European societies and beyond" will take place on July 4 - 6, 2018 in St. Petersburg.

At the conference, ANR-Lab members Daria Maltseva and Stanislav Moiseev (ANR-Lab) in cooperation with Anna Shirokanova (LSSR HSE) are organizing the session "Mixed Methods in Network Analysis".

Social network analysis was institutionalized and became widely known as a form of quantitative methodology, which uses different formal statistical and graph metrics to calculate the relationships between different actors (people, their groups or organizations) represented as networks. At the same time, there is also a tradition of qualitative approach in social network analysis. Even though originally this approach was created in 50th by social anthropologists, its development took place in late 80-90th, together with the stream of "cultural turn" in sociology and the appearance of the field called "relational sociology".

The next possible direction of the social network analysis development is the integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches, which corresponds to the "mixed-methods strategy" of research. The main idea of this integration is to consider the "dual nature of social reality" by focusing both on network structures of relations and external contexts and internal individual meanings of these relations.

This session welcomes papers discussing different issues on the integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches in network analysis, such as mixed methods research designs, techniques for data collection and extraction, software development, methodological approaches to interpretation, applied analyses of mixed data, and their theoretical foundation.

All researchers working at the intersection of two given perspectives of network analysis are invited to participate. The deadline for submitting an application for the conference with a report is January 15, 2018.