Social network analysis using Stata

The field of social network analysis is one of the most rapidly growing fields of the social sciences. Social network analysis focuses on the relationships that exist between individuals (or other units of analysis) such as friendship, advice, trust, or trade relationships. Network analysis is concerned with the visualization and analysis of network structures, as well as with the importance of networks for individuals’ propensities to adopt different kinds of behaviors. Up until now such analyses have only been possible to perform using specialized software for network analysis. This tutorial introduces the so-called nwcommands, a software suite with over 80 Stata commands for social network analysis. The software includes commands (and dialog boxes) for importing, exporting, loading, saving, handling, manipulating, replacing, generating, visualizing, and animating networks. It also includes commands for measuring various properties of the networks and the individual nodes, for detecting network patterns and measuring the similarity of different networks, as well as advanced statistical techniques for network analysis including MR-QAP and ERGM.