Focal structures analysis: identifying influential sets of individuals in a social network

Identifying influential individuals is a well-known approach in extracting actionable knowledge in a network. Existing studies suggest measures to identify influential individuals, i.e., they focus on the question “which individuals are best connected to others or have the most influence?”. Such individuals, however, may not represent the context (relationships, interactions, etc.) entirely in a social network. For example, it is nearly an impossible task for a single individual to organize a mass protest of the scale of the Saudi Arabian women’s 2013 Oct26Driving campaign, the 2012 Occupy Wall Street and the 2011 Arab Spring. Similarly, other events such as mobilizing the 2013 Taksim square-Gezi Park protesters, coordinating crisis response for natural disasters (e.g., the 2010 Haiti earthquake), or even organizing flash mobs would require a key set of individuals rather than a single or the most influential individual in a social network. An alternate line of research dealing with community or cluster identification approaches extract subnetworks of individuals. However, these structures may not represent the key sets of individuals that could coordinate the social processes mentioned above. Therefore, we develop the Focal Structures Analysis (FSA) methodology to extract such key sets of individuals, called focal structures, in a social network. This research goes beyond the traditional unit of analysis, which is an individual or a set of influential individuals, and places focal structures between the individuals and communities/clusters as the unit of analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this type of work is the first effort in identifying influential sets of individuals and would open up new directions for researchers to develop new methods in social network analysis.