Structural cohesion - Misplaced Pages

(Redirected from Cohesion (structural)) Lowest number of people removed to disconnect a social group

This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (August 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In sociology, structural cohesion is the conception of a useful formal definition and measure of cohesion in social groups. It is defined as the minimal number of actors in a social network that need to be removed to disconnect the group. It is thus identical to the question of the node connectivity of a given graph in discrete mathematics. The vertex-cut version of Menger's theorem also proves that the disconnection number is equivalent to a maximally sized group with a network in which every pair of persons has at least this number of separate paths between them. It is also useful to know that k-cohesive graphs (or k-components) are always a subgraph of a k-core, although a k-core is not always k-cohesive. A k-core is simply a subgraph in which all nodes have at least k neighbors but it need not even be connected.

The boundaries of structural endogamy in a kinship group are a special case of structural cohesion.

Software

Cohesive.blocking is the R program for computing structural cohesion according to the Moody-White (2003) algorithm. This wiki site provides numerous examples and a tutorial for use with R.

Examples

Some illustrative examples are presented in the gallery below:

The 6-node ring in the graph has connectivity-2 or a level 2 of structural cohesion because the removal of two nodes is needed to disconnect it.
The 6-node component (1-connected) has an embedded 2-component, nodes 1-5
A 6-node clique is a 5-component, structural cohesion 5

Perceived cohesion

Perceived Cohesion Scale (PCS) is a six item scale that is used to measure structural cohesion in groups. In 1990, Bollen and Hoyle used the PCS and applied it to a study of large groups which were used to assess the psychometric qualities of their scale.

References

N, T; White, Douglas (2003). "Structural Cohesion and Embeddedness: A Hierarchical Concept of Social Groups" (PDF). American Sociological Review. 68 (1): 1–25. doi:10.2307/3088904. JSTOR 3088904. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-09-27. Retrieved 2006-08-19.
White, Douglas; Frank Harary (2001). "The Cohesiveness of Blocks in Social Networks: Node Connectivity and Conditional Density" (book). Sociological Methodology. 31 (1): 305–359. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.304.3296. doi:10.1111/0081-1750.00098. S2CID 15806800. Retrieved 2012-08-13.
Chin, Wynne W., et al. Perceived Cohesion: A Conceptual and Empirical Examination: Adapting and Testing the Perceived Cohesion Scale in a Small-Group Setting. 1999. Small Group Research 30(6):751-766.

v t e Social networks and social media
Types	Personal Professional Sexual Value Clique Adolescent
Networks	Corporate social media Distributed social network (list) Enterprise social networking Enterprise social software Mobile social network Personal knowledge networking
Services	List of social networking services List of virtual communities with more than 1 million users
Concepts and theories	Ambient awareness Assortative mixing Attention inequality Interpersonal bridge Organizational network analysis Small-world experiment Social aspects of television Social capital Social data revolution Social exchange theory Social identity theory Social media and psychology Social media intelligence Social media mining Social media optimization Social network analysis Social web Structural endogamy Virtual collective consciousness
Models and processes	Account verification Aggregation Change detection Blockmodeling Collaboration graph Collaborative consumption Giant Global Graph Lateral communication Reputation system Social bot Social graph Social media analytics Social network analysis software Social networking potential Social television Structural cohesion
Economics	Affinity fraud Attention economy Collaborative finance Creator economy Influencer marketing Narrowcasting Sharing economy Social commerce Social sorting Viral marketing
Phenomena	Algorithmic radicalization Community recognition Complex contagion Computer addiction Consequential strangers Friend of a friend Friending and following Friendship paradox Influence-for-hire Internet addiction Information overload Overchoice Six degrees of separation Social media addiction Social media and suicide Social invisibility Social network game Suicide and the Internet Tribe Viral phenomenon
Related topics	Friendship recession Peer pressure Researchers User profile Online identity Persona Social profiling Viral messages Virtual community

Categories:

Software

Examples

Perceived cohesion

See also

References