From Small Groups to Social Networks

The early history of network analysis, currently in great vogue among social scientists, lies in the small group research of the 1940s and 1950s. At that time, social psychologists pursuing the sociometric concerns originating with Jacob Moreno produced imaginative mathematical methods for deciphering the group structure of affective relations. These methods were limited in their application by computational complexity, which imposed drastic limits on the size of the groups to which they could be applied, as well as by the intellectual context in which they arose, the study of small and well-bounded groups. Two developments during the 1960s changed the significance of these methods decisively. One was the realization that a body of mathematics, graph theory, was highly suited for describing the key features of group structures. The other was the introduction of high-speed computers, which suddenly and sharply increased the size of the groups within the scope of mathematical methods.

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