Desert Pacific Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center, Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Schizophr Bull. 2024 Jul 27;50(4):723-730. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbae082.
People with schizophrenia face challenges with forming and maintaining social relationships, often resulting in poor social functioning. Commonly used measures of social functioning provide broad information relating to social relationships, but they do not adequately capture information regarding network structure and characteristics of network members. One method that can assess these more detailed aspects of social networks and provide a more comprehensive understanding of social functioning deficits is egocentric social network analysis (SNA). SNA is a scientific discipline that uses principles of network science and graph theory to analyze social relations quantitatively. Even though some types of SNA have been applied in prior schizophrenia studies, its application as a framework to measure social functioning has been extremely limited. Therefore, this article aims to formally introduce SNA and select quantitative SNA metrics, including measures of network composition, structure, homophily, and centrality, to schizophrenia researchers as novel ways of measuring components of social functioning. To demonstrate the application of SNA, we provide illustrative examples of the SNA metrics and graphical diagrams of social networks for two individuals with schizophrenia.
精神分裂症患者在建立和维持社交关系方面面临挑战，通常导致社交功能不佳。常用的社交功能衡量标准提供了与社交关系相关的广泛信息，但它们不能充分捕捉有关网络结构和网络成员特征的信息。一种可以评估社交网络这些更详细方面并更全面地了解社交功能缺陷的方法是自我中心社交网络分析（SNA）。SNA 是一门科学学科，它使用网络科学和图论的原理对社交关系进行定量分析。尽管先前的精神分裂症研究中已经应用了某些类型的 SNA，但将其作为衡量社交功能的框架的应用却极为有限。因此，本文旨在向精神分裂症研究人员正式介绍 SNA，并选择定量 SNA 指标，包括网络组成、结构、同质性和中心性的衡量标准，作为衡量社交功能组成部分的新方法。为了演示 SNA 的应用，我们为两名精神分裂症患者提供了 SNA 指标的说明性示例和社交网络图的图形表示。
