Qualitative Social Network
Analysis: Visualising and
Analysing the Personal Networks
of Suffragettes
© 2018 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods Datasets.
Qualitative Social Network
Analysis: Visualising and
Analysing the Personal Networks
of Suffragettes
Student Guide
Introduction
Sociologists often work with research questions and data that are ‘relational’ in
nature. This means that they are not primarily concerned with individual actors,
but with the relationships between actors. Social network analysis (SNA) is a
method that takes the ‘connections’ or ‘ties’ between actors as the focus of
analysis, and assumes that the structure and patterning of relationships matters
for what individuals think and do. While SNA can have a strong quantitative
focus, this data exemplar will illustrate ways in which you might analyse network
data qualitatively (QSNA). The data used is provided by Dr. Gemma Edwards
from the University of Manchester, and is taken from research she conducted
on the personal social networks of suffragettes. The aim of this research was
to explore how ordinary women at the turn of the twentieth century became
involved in the militant campaign for ‘Votes for Women’ in Britain. The focus
was on their interpersonal relationships, considering that we know from existing
studies of social movements that ‘networks matter’ for participation (Passy, 2003).
The analysis focuses on two suffragettes who were members of the Women’s
Social and Political Union (WSPU): Helen Watts (from Nottingham) and Mary
Blathwayt (from Bath). Gemma analyses how their interpersonal relationships
shaped their choices around activism. The data provided relates to Helen Watts
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specifically, and comprises a sample of letters surrounding her activism in 1909,
and visualisations of her social network. The exemplar will help you to think about
how visualisations and qualitative data from historical archives can be used in
dialogue to analyse social networks qualitatively.
Social Network Analysis Using Qualitative Sources
Data about people’s relationships, connections and ties to others is often
produced in the course of qualitative research. We find this kind of ‘relational’
data in interview narratives, ethnographic accounts, and documents such as
letters and diaries. Qualitative (textual) materials, such as the sourcebook of
historical letters accompanying this exemplar, are valuable sources of relational
data because they not only hold important clues about who people know, but
also provide insights into what these relationships mean, and why they matter.
In social network analysis, we extract relational data about who knows whom.
It is useful to input this data into a matrix, which can be used as the basis of
visualisation (and if desired, measurement) in computer packages like Pajek (de
Nooy, Mrvar, & Batagelj, 2012) or UCINET (Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002).
Figure 1 shows an example of a matrix in UCINET, used here to record the social
ties of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (‘1’ is used to denote a tie, ‘0’ is used to
denote no tie).
Figure 1: Example of a social network matrix in UCINET
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In UCINET, the programme netdraw easily creates visualisations of the data
contained within the matrix (these visualisations are also called sociograms).
There are some examples of visualisations below and in the data provided.
Sociograms are valuable even when the analysis of the network is to remain
primarily qualitative. Visualisations of the network can reveal its key structural
features, and can be an important stage in analysis (D’Angelo, Ryan, & Tubaro,
2016). Qualitative data sources, however, are crucial in helping the researcher
to interpret what the network visualisations mean, and to investigate not just the
structure of people’s relationships, but their content (Edwards, 2010).
Data Exemplar: The Personal Social Networks of Suffragettes
The data used in this exemplar are drawn from Dr Gemma Edwards’ research on
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the personal social networks of suffragettes. This research aimed to understand
how ordinary women became involved in militant, and at times violent, protests
during the campaign for ‘Votes for Women’. In particular, it explored the role
played by their interpersonal networks, drawing upon previous research about the
importance of social networks for social movement participation (Passy, 2003).
The research used historical archives relating to suffragettes to map, analyse, and
compare their social networks. Two middle-class suffragettes who were in their
mid-twenties at the time are included in the analysis: Helen Watts (a member
of the Nottingham Women’s Social and Political Union), and Mary Blathwayt (a
member of the Bath Women’s Social and Political Union). Helen Watts’ archive
includes letters written around the time of her activism, and her speeches
delivered on release from prison in 1909 (Nottingham Archives Office), while
Mary Blathwayt’s archive consists of diaries, written by her and her family, which
recorded her involvement with the suffragettes between 1906 and 1913
(Gloucester Records Office). The data provided for exploration is from Helen
Watts’ archive specifically, and comprises eight letters and three network
visualisations. This data exemplar is intended to illustrate one way in which you
might approach the analysis of social networks qualitatively.
Analysing Social Networks Qualitatively
In what follows, Gemma details the reasons for doing Qualitative Social Network
Analysis, as well as how you might approach it. She uses historical documents
to show the importance of personal social networks amongst members of the
suffragettes.
Watts’ and Blathwayt’s Personal Social Networks
In order to conduct an analysis of Watts’ and Blathwayt’s personal social networks,
some basic relational data first needs to be extracted from the historical sources
relating to their involvement with the suffragettes. The basic data we need for
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a personal network analysis (also called ‘ego-net’ analysis, see Crossley et al.,
2015) are (1) data about the individual/ego’s ties to others (their ‘alters’), and (2)
data about the ties between the alters. The Helen Watts letters are particularly
valuable in this respect (see the sourcebook). As an archive of correspondence,
they act as a historical trace of her relationships at the time, providing one way
to see who she was in contact with (see network visualisation 1 in the data
provided). You can also see from the letters in the sourcebook how network data
is embedded within the narrative of the historical sources, just as they might
within interview narratives. In Letter 1, for example, Watts ‘talks her ties’ to others,
and in the process provides important contextual information about how she met
certain individuals, what role they played, what she thought of them and so on. In
Letters 4 and 5, we can see how the act of communication itself is constructing
a relationship and attempting to establish a tie, for example on the basis of
homophily (i.e. we have lots in common – ‘I too am a clergyman’s daughter’,
letter 5). All of the relational data contained within the letters can be extracted to
produce another visualisation of Helen’s social network (see network visualisation
2). We might build up the picture of her network even further by adding the
relational data gained from other historical sources and over a longer time period
(see network visualisation 3).
When extracting relational data from qualitative sources, you will have to make
some important decisions, such as the time period you will cover (this will perhaps
be dictated by the data source), and where the boundaries of the network will be
drawn (when working with historical sources or documents you will have to take
a ‘nominalist’ approach to network boundaries, where the researcher must decide
the criteria for including and excluding ties). This relates to another important
decision you will have to make about what counts as a ‘tie’. Your research
question will help to inform you here, for instance you will be interested in mapping
particular ‘tie-types’ such as ‘friendship’ or ‘co-participation’, or perhaps certain
types of ‘exchange’, and this is what you should be looking for in the data source
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in order to ascertain whether or not to record a tie as present or absent.
Once the basic network data have been extracted from the qualitative sources,
it is useful to produce a visualisation of the network so that you can see the
relationships mapped out. UCINET and its accompanying netdraw was used to
create the visualisations in Figure 2 (Borgatti et al., 2002), while Pajek was used
to create the visualisations in the data provided (de Nooy et al., 2012). Firstly, you
create a matrix of your basic network data, which records whether ties between
people are present (1) or absent (0) and then produce a visualisation of the
network. While this is part of describing (and later, presenting) your data, it can
also be a valuable stage in your analysis. Figure 2 shows the visualisations
produced in my analysis of Helen Watts’ and Mary Blathwayt’s networks in 1909,
when they first got their opportunity to go to prison for the cause.
Figure 2: Network visualisations of Helen Watts’ personal network in
1909 (top), and Mary Blathwayt’s personal network in 1909 (bottom)
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The visualisation (along with some basic measures of the structural properties of
the network, such as its density, the centrality of nodes, number of components
and so forth, that you can easily perform in UCINET) helps you to observe
interesting structural features about the network, which you can investigate further
with the qualitative sources. For example, in the network visualisations in Figure
2, you can see that data about the attributes of the people in the network have
been added by using different shapes and shades for the network ‘nodes’. These
tell us useful information, such as whether Watts’ and Blathwayt’s contacts were
women from their local area or outside of it (circles are local, triangles not);
women who had been involved in militant protests before, or not (black nodes
had been arrested); women who were in the same suffrage organisation as them,
or from other organisations (square nodes are the non-militant suffragists). The
visualisations of the network are therefore helping to both raise and address
analytic questions. Analysis proceeds most fruitfully, however, when a dialogue is
established between the network visualisation and the qualitative data.
By looking at the network visualisations in Figure 2, we can observe some obvious
differences that we might want to investigate qualitatively using the historical data
sources. Watts’ network is one single component in which everyone is tied to
everyone else, something we could refer to as a ‘clique’. Nearly all the people
in it are local women from Nottingham. Blathwayt’s network, in contrast, looks
like it has different clusters within it, with different degrees of interconnection.
The attributes of the people in it are also more diverse. Many have been to
prison already (the black nodes), one is a prominent member of the non-militant
suffragists (the square node, Lillias Ashworth Hallet), and her parents occupy a
central position (they in fact mediate all her contacts).
We might assume from the visualisations that Blathwayt is the more heavily
involved in militant activism because she is tied to many more suffragettes who
have been to prison, but in fact it is Watts who goes on to be arrested (twice in
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1909), and Blathwayt who, over time, distances herself from militant tactics and
eventually resigns her WSPU membership. An analysis of the qualitative sources
is crucial for explaining this. Look at the letters provided in the sourcebook.
Despite some mild challenges made to her action by family (letter 6), and
references to stigma and losing friends (letter 4), the letters between family and
friends reveal a close-knit, supportive network around Watts. Watts talks further
in her speeches about how she came to develop a strong sense of shared
purpose and identity within her Nottingham clique. Indeed, close-knit network
structures like hers have been associated with high levels of trust and solidarity
and the development of collective identity. Watts finds ultimate motivation from
feeling that she is part of something bigger than herself, and her sense of self-
identity is transformed into a group identity, as captured well in letter 7 from her
Nottingham comrade, who calls her ‘Nottingham’s representative!’ By contrast,
Mary Blathwayt’s mother writes in her diary about how the family are struggling
to make up their minds about the moral legitimacy of the militant tactics being
used by suffragettes. This is made all the more pertinent as they are confronted
by examples of violence and arrest on the part of those within their personal
network, while also being exposed to counter-influences (for example from the
non-militants they know, like Lillias Ashworth Hallet). They enter a period of moral
ambiguity, and find no such shared purpose, identity, or agreed script as we see
in Watts’ network.
Mary Blathwayt is constrained by her parents when it comes to participating in
militant events. She records in her diary that she had a letter asking her to
take part in a militant event that she knew would lead to her arrest. This is
particularly significant considering the central mediating position we know that her
parents have in her network, and which is shown in the visualisation (the more
central nodes are bigger in size). McAdam and Paulsen (1993) show that a major
constraining factor when it comes to involvement in ‘high-risk’ activism is non-
supportive family. Watts manages to circumvent this countervailing influence by
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keeping her intention to get arrested a secret from her family and close friends,
who do not appear in her network until after her arrest. We can see from the letters
in the sourcebook that much of the letter-writing activity was about getting to grips
with her action and repairing familial relationships (letters 1, 3 and 6 in particular).
Overall
There are many more issues that can be pulled out of the network visualisations
and the wider historical archives that surround them. The point, however, has
been to illustrate the way in which a qualitative analysis of social networks involves
a dialogue between network visualisations, which can be helpful for looking at
the structure of social ties, and qualitative sources (here, letters, speeches and
diaries, but you might equally use interview narratives), which are helpful for
understanding the content, meaning, and consequences of ties. Jan Fuhse (2009)
argues that qualitative analysis is valuable because it can help researchers
unpack the ‘meaning structure’ of the social network. The meaning structure of
the network consists of the shared cultural scripts and discourses from which
individuals must draw (like the shared script on militancy); interpersonal
expectations relating to relationships (such as parents’ expectations of their
children); and interpersonal expectations relating to identities (such as the
development of collective identities and the obligations they entail). Qualitative
analysis therefore aims to draw upon textual, narrative sources in order to help
unlock the meaning structure of social networks, and to address the content and
consequences of social ties. From the dataset we have learnt that social ties
mattered for involvement in suffragette militancy. Not only did we find clues about
the importance of social ties by visualising the structure of social relationships in
which Watts and Blathwayt were embedded (composition, degree of homogeneity,
centrality of parents), but by probing the networks using qualitative historical data
we have also gained a deeper understanding as to how these social relationships
affected and influenced what they thought and what they did.
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Reflective Questions
1. Watts’ network is based on an archive of letters and speeches, and
Blathwayt’s network is based on diaries. How might the nature of the
source affect the quality and depth of network data? Can personal
networks be directly compared?
2. How could other sources of qualitative data like interviews and
ethnography, be used to (a) construct social network data, and (b)
analyse social network data?
3. What about the problem of ‘missing data’? Using historical archives
means relying on what has survived and been recorded. Even using
interviews, people may fail to recall all of their ties. Is missing data a
bigger problem for social network analysis than it is for other kinds of
social research?
4. Considering that the letters in the sourcebook are dated, how might
qualitative social network analysis address the issue of change over
time in social networks? Can network visualisations capture the
dynamic and changing nature of social ties?
Further Reading
Bellotti, E. (2014). Qualitative networks: Mixed methods in sociological research.
London: Routledge
Borgatti, S. P., Everett, M. G., & Freeman, L. C. (2002). Ucinet for Windows:
Software for social network analysis. Harvard, MA: Analytic Technologies.
Crossley, N., Bellotti, E., Edwards, G., Everett, M., Koskinen, J., & Tranmer,
M. (2015). Social network analysis for ego-nets. London: SAGE Publishing.
D’Angelo, A., Ryan, L., & Tubaro, P. (2016). Visualization in mixed methods
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research on social networks. Sociological Research Online, 21(2), 15.
De Nooy, W., Mrvar, A., & Batagelj, V. (2012). Exploratory social network
analysis with Pajek (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edwards, G., & Crossley, N. (2009). Measures and meanings: Exploring the ego-
net of Helen Kirkpatrick Watts, Militant Suffragette. Methodological Innovations
Online, 4(2009), 37–61.
Edwards, G. (2010). Mixed-methods approaches to social network analysis.
National Centre for Research Methods. Working paper 015. Retrieved from
http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/842/
Edwards, G. (2014). Infectious innovations? The diffusion of tactical innovation
in social movement networks, the case of suffragette militancy. Social Movement
Studies, 13(1), 48–69.
Fuhse, J. (2009). The meaning structure of social networks. Sociological Theory,
27, 51–73.
McAdam, D., & Paulsen, R. (1993). Specifying the relationship between social
ties and activism. American Journal of Sociology, 99, 640–667.
Passy, F. (2003). Social networks matter: But how? In M. Diani & D. McAdam
(Eds.), Social movements and networks: Relational approaches to collective
action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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