Sociograms
Note: Sociograms are only available on NVivo for PC with coding enhancements enabled. So check that your installation of NVivo includes sociograms before you decide to conduct a social network analysis.
About Sociograms
Use sociograms as a method to visualize networks, and use networks to answer questions about social interdependence, for example:
- Identify central and peripheral authors in a theme or area.
- Study the flow of citation and reference information.
- Identify how authors disagree and agre, critique and support with each other.
- Map out which researchers write together and analyse the clusters of researchers working in a particular field.
Our guide is written in the context of review work, where you could use the social network feature to explore relationships between your articles, authors, and books.
Of course you can use NVivo and sociograms to analyse social media, such as this guide to analysing X (Twitter) data
Links to an external site. from 2023 by QDA Training.
There are two sociograms you can use in your review. These are:
Egocentric sociograms
Egocentric sociograms visualize how your cases are connected to a selected case.
Network sociograms
Visualize a group of cases to see how they are connected. This type of sociogram can include isolated cases.
Getting Started
To create the sociograms, you first have to create a case Links to an external site. for each author and code all the authors work to the case code. You also need to make each article as a case and code each article to that case node. Then using the "Relationship Code" function, you to define the relationships and the direction of these relationships you want to include in your analysis, such as "cites", "develops further", "co-author", or "critiques", etc.
As you read, you code the text-snippet you want to code with the case article that you are reading, choose the relationship and the case of the article or author you are indicating a relationship with.
You can find step-by-step instructions here "Extending your Literature Review with NVivo Links to an external site. (2020) by Silvana di Gregorio, PhD."
On the sociogram the relationships you code are represented at lines or arrows between your case authors and case articles. These relationships are called edges, and the direction of the edges shows the direction of the relationship. The case articles and case authors are called "vertices" and NVivo uses different vertex metrics to calculate how connected a vertex is in your sociogram which you could then interpret to mean something about the influence or lack thereof, of an author.
Read more about the metrics and how to interpret them on this NVivo help page:
https://help-nv.qsrinternational.com/20/win/Content/vizualizations/sociograms.htm
Links to an external site.
A Word to the Wise
The sociograms you can produce in NVivo are very basic. There are very few colour and layout options. You have to code each relationship and link between the objects in your project manually as you read through your text corpus. This can mean a lot of work and you want to avoid missing relationships and having to start your coding work again. Therefore, before you start coding, it is important to clarify which are the relationships and links you are going to code, what you are going to call these, and in which direction do these relationships flow, for example define if the relationship is with a direction or is it symmetrical.
There are other programmes and software that can produce more sophisticated social network analyses. Before starting your social network analysis consider if any of the following tools are a better fit with the ambition you have for your project, the time you have to do the analysis and your own technical skills and knowledge of social network analyses.
The tools the library can help you with are marked with an * . Read more about our services, the tools we support, courses and how to get in touch: https://kub.kb.dk/datalab Links to an external site.
Recommended visualisation tools:
Gephi: https://gephi.org/tutorials/gephi-tutorial-quick_start.pdf Links to an external site.
*VosViewer: https://www.vosviewer.com/ Links to an external site.
*Voyant Tools: https://voyant-tools.org/ Links to an external site.
*Orange: https://orangedatamining.com/
*R: https://statisticsglobe.com/making-network-data-r Links to an external site.
*Python: https://www.askpython.com/python/examples/network-analysis-in-python Links to an external site.
There are of course lots of other tools and more and more are being developed. This is a selection that may be useful:
https://www.rankred.com/free-social-network-analysis-tools/
Links to an external site.
Videos and tutorials about NVivo social network analysis in literature reviews
McNiff, K. (2023, October 31). A roadmap for setting up cases in NVivo. Lumivero. https://lumivero.com/resources/a-roadmap-for-setting-up-cases-in-nvivo/
Di Gregorio, S. (2021, March). Extending your Literature Review with NVivo. Lumivero. Retrieved February 1, 2024, from https://lumivero.com/resources/extending-your-literature-review-nvivo-12-plus/ Links to an external site.