Abstract (EN)

Part of sociologists' work is to contextualize individual and collective behaviour (Silverman and Gubrium 1994). Contextualization has both a substantive and a methodological dimension. Substantively, it means identifying specific constraints put on some members' behaviour and specific opportunities offered to them and to others. Methodologically, it is a necessary step for comparative analysis and for appropriate generalization of results. Network analysis is an efficient way of contextualizing actors' behaviour, based on description and inductive modelling of a specific aspect of this context: the relational pattern, or ‘structure’, of the social setting in which action is observed. It requires collecting specific data on the relationships and exchanges between all the members, and analysing these data using specific procedures.1 In fact, it can be seen as a systematic and formalized version of a kind of analysis that sociologists and ethnographers have always done intuitively: collecting information...