Moser, C., P. Groenewegen & M. Huysman (forthcoming)
Extending Social Network Analysis with Discourse Analysis – Combining Relational with Interpretive Data. In: Social Networks Analysis and Mining, Springer
Online occupational communities are a rapidly growing phenomenon and will become increasingly important to firms in the future. This growth has been mirrored by scientific innovations: major advances have been made with regard to technology, software development and statistical modeling. However, we are often left with only partial information: although we might be able to gather very detailed and massive relational data from for example online communities, we often overlook information on the ties that bind. While we are provided with an increasingly detailed topology of a network this does not allude to what content is at stake. We therefore propose to combine Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Discourse Analysis (DA) in order to reach a deeper understanding of the community. Data from an ongoing study of an online occupational community were analyzed as an example using SNA and DA. We present findings from SNA and are able to complement this relational information with interpretive findings from DA. We contribute to the methodological literature on online communities, in particular in the fields of SNA and DA.
