ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the potential importance of network analysis for primate welfare and management science. It presents an introduction to social network analysis, followed by a discussion of the utility of these tools for captive primate behavioral management, and in particular, social group management. Social networks are typically represented as sociograms. They can be represented both in matrix form and as a graph. A primary use of graph theory in social network analysis is to identify "important" or "key" actors. Centrality concepts quantify theoretical ideas about an individual actor's or node's prominence within a network. Especially useful metrics of prominence include degree, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvalue centrality. Percolation and Conductance is a method for characterizing directional flow through a directed, weighted network, and it is perhaps most useful for determining the hierarchical structure of a society, because dominance interactions are typically unidirectional within a dyad.
