Alessandra Rister Portinari Maranca

resources

SOCIAL NETWORKS

There is an eternity of great social networks papers in sociology. However, when it comes to getting a quick practice in the methodologists deployed by sociologists, I recommend these two resources:

  1. Network Analysis: Integrating Social Network Theory, Method, and Application with R (2023) by Craig Rawlings, Jeffrey Smith, James Moody, and Daniel McFarland. You can find the GitHub with all the R tutorials here.
  2. For a quicker 10-part course, Mark Hoffman’s Fall 2021 SOC 379 class markdown is extremely helpful. You can access that here.

MATHEMATICAL SOCIOLOGY

Phillip Bonacich and Philip Lu’s Introduction to Mathematical Sociology from 2012 provides a theoretical and very introductory picture of mathematical sociology. It is a great read regardless of level of mathematical background. You can find it on Amazon here. A few great papers, in addition to to the book, might help introduce one to the field:

  1. Feld, Scott L. “Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do.” American Journal of Sociology 96, no. 6 (1991): 1464–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2781907.
  2. Sørensen, Aage B. “Mathematical models in sociology.” Annual review of sociology 4.1 (1978): 345-371.
  3. Rashevsky, Nicolas. “Topology and life: in search of general mathematical principles in biology and sociology.” The bulletin of mathematical biophysics 16 (1954): 317-348.
  4. Fararo, Thomas J. “The nature of mathematical sociology: A non-technical essay.” Social Research (1969): 75-92.

FUZZY-SET SOCIAL SCIENCE

When it comes to fuzzy-set social science, I believe the first step would be familiarizing yourself with fuzzy set theory (as coined by Zadeh, perhaps reading the paper Zadeh, Lotfi A. “Fuzzy sets.” Information and control 8.3 (1965): 338-353.). Then, Professor Charles Ragin’s Fuzzy Set Social Science (2000) and the more recent Redesigning social inquiry (2014) are great reads to get acquainted with this new methodological idea. A paper which in my opinion has applied fuzzy sets beautifully to its research question is Katz, vom Hau, and Mahoney’s 2005 Explaining the Great Reversal in Spanish America: Fuzzy-Set Analysis Versus Regression Analysis in Sociological Methods & Research, 33(4), 539-573 https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124104266002.