Social Network Analysis for efficient delivery of Agricultural Extension Services
The Social Network Analysis paper by Devki and Tripathi is drawn from research presentations of the 11th International Conference on Computing and Networking Technology hosted by IEEE.
With the current era marked as the social age, knowledge becomes more powerful if you share it. The paper is drawn to how growth in social networks such as Facebook and Whatsapp are facilitating the exchange of agricultural knowledge. By applying social networks to agricultural extension services, Devi and Tripathi explore how the most influential farmers in a locality act as a central point through which agricultural information is disseminated to other farmers. The paper applies social network analysis as an analytical tool to unravel the relationships among farm stakeholders and evaluate the power and influence of a farmer’s position in an agricultural extension network. The social network analysis applies the principle of centrality to show how farmers who act as ‘central nodes’ yield a lot of influence and serve as ‘strategic spread points’ for the dissemination of agricultural extension services from social network platforms.
The paper applies concepts covered in class from Chapter 3, 4 and 5 of the Networks, Crowds and Market textbook. Particularly, Devki and Tripathi are invested in concepts on the structural analysis of networks as presented in the case of the strength and network structure of large scale data since the paper draws from large data sets from facebook and Twitter. Further the emphasis of the paper on centrality mirrors the concepts of networks in their surrounding contexts(chapter 4) and structural balance as covered in chapter 5.
Source: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9225274