Networks and Religion
That social networks play a central role in religious life is fairly well established. We know, for instance, that they are crucial for the recruitment and retention of members, the diffusion of religious ideas and practices, motivating individuals to volunteer and become politically active, the health and well-being of people of faith, and conflict, radicalization, and sometimes violence. However, most of the research in this area has been conducted by social scientists unfamiliar with social network analysis (SNA). In fact, only a handful of those most qualified to apply SNA to the area of religion have shown any interest in doing so. Thus, one of this book's purposes is to introduce to facilitate the study of networks and religion using formal SNA methods. If you are interested in purchasing it, click on the book's image below.
This companion website's primary purpose is to illustrate a few SNA packages (e.g., UCINET, Pajek, R, PNet) and how to reproduce some of the results in the book's text itself. Since not all of the datasets are publicly available, sometimes other datasets are used. In addition, this website highlights any (unintentional) errors in the text that I inadvertently missed. Just click on the links below (to the right of the book cover), and they will take you to each chapter's webpage.
