The complex structure of social networks

Abstract

Over the last two decades, physicists and mathematicians have created a series of models that attempt to explain both the structure and the dynamics of social networks among other kinds of networks. It has been written a lot about these models originated in statistic physics, but almost always in a distant and dark way for Social Sciences. The purpose of this paper is to present the first models (Watts-Strogatz, Barabási-Albert and Newman) in an accessible language for social scientists. The relevance of analyse such models lies in the fact that they allows one to understand the structure of social networks, such as small world, scale free and “assortativity”, as well as explain several social dynamics derived from such structures.