<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>The structural cohesion model is a powerful theoretical conception of cohesion in social groups, but its diffusion in empirical literature has been hampered by operationalization and computational problems. In this paper, we start from the classic definition of structural cohesion as the minimum number of actors who need to be removed in a network in order to disconnect it, and extend it by using average node connectivity as a finer grained measure of cohesion. We present useful heuristics for computing structural cohesion that allow a speed-up of one order of magnitude over the algorithms currently available. We analyze three large collaboration networks (co-maintenance of Debian packages, co-authorship in Nuclear Theory and High-Energy Theory) and show how our approach can help researchers measure structural cohesion in relatively large networks. We also introduce a novel graphical representation of the structural cohesion analysis to quickly spot differences across networks.</p></abstract>

The structural cohesion model is a powerful theoretical conception of cohesion in social groups, but its diffusion in empirical literature has been hampered by operationalization and computational problems. In this paper, we start from the classic definition of structural cohesion as the minimum number of actors who need to be removed in a network in order to disconnect it, and extend it by using average node connectivity as a finer grained measure of cohesion. We present useful heuristics for computing structural cohesion that allow a speed-up of one order of magnitude over the algorithms currently available. We analyze three large collaboration networks (co-maintenance of Debian packages, co-authorship in Nuclear Theory and High-Energy Theory) and show how our approach can help researchers measure structural cohesion in relatively large networks. We also introduce a novel graphical representation of the structural cohesion analysis to quickly spot differences across networks.

Structural Cohesion: Visualization and Heuristics for Fast Computation

Journal of Social Structure

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

{"article-title":"Structural Cohesion: Visualization and Heuristics for Fast Computation"}

The structural cohesion model is a powerful theoretical conception of cohesion in social groups, but its diffusion in empirical literature has been hampered by...

Structural Cohesion: Visualization and Heuristics for Fast Computation

Published Online: Aug 13, 2019

Page range: 1 - 36

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/joss-2019-018

© 2019 Jordi Torrents et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.