Publication details
Social Networks in Educational Processes
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
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| Description | Social networks have been mainly used in two directions in educational research. First, they have been used as a methodological approach whose proponents frequently rely, to give just one example, on “social network analysis” (Wasserman & Faust, 2019). Within this approach, social networks are understood as analytical structures that comprise individual actors and institutions, both of which are called nodes, and the interactions that exist between them. This enables the researchers to study the positions of individual actors within the social networks and quantify the nature of unidirectional and mutual relationships that interconnect the actors. In educational research, social networks have been employed on numerous levels ranging from small social structures (such as classrooms, see for example Kindermann, 2007) to specific macro-structures such as institutions that connect authors publishing in educational sciences (see for example Juhaňák, 2017). Second, social networks have been used by authors as the theoretical background for their research. In this area, social networks are understood as “an analytical construct” with “observed and nonobserved dyadic relationships between actors” (Fuhse, 2009, p. 52). Within this second approach, social networks are discovered by authors through research of interactions represented by communicative processes and mediate what is happening 6 EDITORIAL between individual or corporate actors in social networks, and through meanings emerging from the interactions (Fuhse, 2009; see for example Engle et al., 2014; Karam et al., 2019). By observing interactions and studying meanings that lie at the background of these interactions, researchers can create estimates about the nature of social networks and describe in detail the processes ongoing within them. Studies printed in this issue approach social networks from both of these directions. The first four studies employ social networks as a methodological framework; the last three studies use them as a theoretical framework. |