Abstract
This article focuses on using social network analysis (SNA) to evaluate social planning. A case study on a regional policy, the Territorial Youth Plans (PTGs), is presented. PTGs were introduced by the Campania Region (Southern Italy) in 2009 as an effort to reform the regional youth policies to foster increased participation in decision-making processes. In our case study, we use a combination of SNA tools and multivariate data analysis techniques to analyze if and how the structure of interactions between actors at the local level shapes the quality of planning in terms of coherence and innovation.
The relational data have been gathered through the analysis of official documents. Attention has been directed to the following aspects: (1) describing the networks characteristics, (2) detecting networks with a typical and homogenous structure configuration, and (3) determining the relationship between several network structure configurations and different forms of social planning, assuming that relational structures of networks shape the coherence of social planning activity and local innovation capacity.
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Notes
- 1.
The research project has been supported by the Campania Region Grant for the “Permanent Observatory on Youth Policies and Youth Condition” and by the project REPOS, Reti di Politiche Pubbliche e Sviluppo.
- 2.
PTGs trace the model of similar instruments, such as Piani di Zona (Area Plans), adopted since 2000 in the social policies domain.
- 3.
Campania Region is divided in 62 school districts, each of them involves a groups of municipalities in close geographical proximity.
- 4.
The number of analyzed plans, on a total of 48 districts involved in the experimentation of the PTGs, depends on the completeness of the available information in accordance with our research interests.
- 5.
A full research report is cfr. Bisceglia et al. (2013).
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Lumino, R., Scolorato, C. (2014). The Analysis of Partnership Networks in Social Planning Processes. In: Vicari, D., Okada, A., Ragozini, G., Weihs, C. (eds) Analysis and Modeling of Complex Data in Behavioral and Social Sciences. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06692-9_21
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