SAGE Research Methods – The SAGE Encyclopedia of Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation

In social network analysis, the term network density refers to a measure of the prevalence of dyadic linkage or direct tie within a social network. A social network can be defined as a network formed by a set of interacting social entities (actors) and the linkages (relations or edges) among them. A dyad, referring to a pair of actors, is the smallest structure of a social network. Through examining the prevalence of dyadic connections, researchers can gain insight into the interaction between actors in a network. Network density is an important attribute and property used to describe a network. Usually, a dyadic relation is numerically coded as a binary variable with 1 and 0 representing the presence and absence of a tie, respectively. The index …