Social Network and Content Analysis: An Integrated Methodology to Investigate a Global Community Evolution

The present study describes an Integrated Methodology developed combining Social Network and Content Analysis approaches, to investigate the organizational mechanisms responsible for the creation of Social Capital within Communities. The methodological integration is proposed to overcome one of the main limitations of Social Network Analysis (SNA): the analysis of the content of the information flows and the organizational and cultural aspects of their exchanges. The methodological framework was able to differentiate the “ties” among community members on the basis of the subject matter of the information flows. It showed its reliability for Project-oriented Virtual Communities to discover and draw the development path of their projects, from the new idea generation to the project outcome delivery, through the content “tagging” of the information flows. It is suitable to describe the main characteristics of a project-oriented community, useful and effective to monitor the processes developed within the community.