Abstract

Drawn on his own research, Crossley points out some issues in which SNA fails to provide a reliable assessment and also shows convincingly how mixed methods help to overcome those limitations. In this comment I suggest other possible interpretations of those supposed fallacies of SNA, to provide an explanation of this divergence and, finally, to discuss what is the nature of the data we are working with. This reveals to us that the algebra we use for reproducing the social world (mainly based on positive numbers) is one of many possible. Social networks are not ontological realities but measures of a dynamic reality. As far as our measure is imperfect, we only can address some important issues indirectly and with the aid of qualitative approaches.