Sociology study using email data and social network analysis

Abstract

Nowadays data mining and social network analysis techniques are broadly being used to study social structure of the underlying community. Internet has crept into our lives because of more and more dependency on online resources. We can precisely identify how society behaves from their presence in the cyber space. People are leaving so much foot prints on the cyber space that their online social structure can be extracted. In this research we have gathered email data of 23 graduate level students and applied social network analysis techniques. Social perspective of all the students has been extracted and threshold is applied on upper and lower bounds of data. We have extracted roles among people in the social setting and identified that how people behave while fulfilling those roles. We have also gathered survey data for those 23 students and extracted the social perspective in the same way as done for email data. We have performed the survey to extract what role a person is performing and related the social roles with the extracted social perspectives. At the end we have performed the validation process by comparing our results with the survey data. Our results showed strong correlation between emails data and survey data. Social structure of the students in the cyber space and in the real life was nearly same. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work in which both emails data and actual data in the form of survey for validation purposes is being used.