Commentary: Social Network Analysis and the Social Work Profession

Abstract

T wo recent issues of the Journal of the Society for Research and Social Work (i.e., Vol. 5, No. 4; Vol. 6, No. 3) included four research articles dealing with current applications of social network analysis. These articles reflected diverse target populations of interest to the social work profession, including homeless youth (Barman-Adhikari, Rice, Winetrobe, & Petering, 2015), dually diagnosed adults (Henwood et al., 2015), incarcerated women (Kriegel, Hsu, & Wenzel, 2015), and service delivery networks for children with behavioral health problems (Bunger, Doogan, & Cao, 2014). Taken together, these articles illustrate the diversity of applications of social network analysis in social work research at the present time. This collection of articles also draws upon a long-standing focus in the social work profession on the reciprocal role of social networks as a reflection of the social environment in the development, maintenance, and amelioration of social problems—that is, social work’s person-in-environment perspective.