REAL
Keystone sector methodology applied to Portugal
other, needs to be exploited further in a microstructure analysis (distance between two
nodes).
Considering a Component as the largest subset of related actors within a
network, means all actors relate to each other. When socio-matrices are dense we
expect to find single components; when they are not, we expect to find components
with different sizes. At least Money didn’t appear to show a dense relation, but
computing the UCINET test for components we found single components for all the 3
matrices. So far, we can say that TT has an overall dense network, where almost the
entities can reach the others, mainly through two other agents in town. MON matrix
remains sparse and two actors play the major role.
In the next section we are going to analyze the Prominence of the actors - more
central and prestigious entities.
4.2. The results for the Micro-structure
From the preliminary tests we know that in TT town there are not isolated
actors; somehow each actor is able to reach all the others in the network. However, we
know that these links are not all mutual and that if some actors give/receive a lot
to/from others, some other actors are not so prominent, which means they are not so
extensively involved in relationships with the actors presented in the list.
4.2.1 Prominence
Prominence can be seen in different ways; actually an actor can be both a
receiver and a transmitter or it can play only one of these roles. In order to rank the
entities, we should consider all the direct ties both originated from (outdegree) and
received by (indegree) the actor, plus all the indirect ties in consequence of the
multiple step paths.
If we compute different matrix sizes or compare across different social
networks, these measures of prominence should be standardized, normalizing each set
of degree (in and out) with respect to the numbers of agents. In TT case, all the
matrices have the same size (83x83), so that we did not need to do so.
In each table the results will include the sample statistics for prestige and
centrality, allowing the ranking related with entities that showed values above the
mean plus standard deviation distance. Actors with higher outdegree levels (they origin
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