Social network analysis of the casual community: identifying key players and network structure

Vigorously developing a sports community, changing its promotion mode, improving the service concept of a sports community, and highlighting the social, recreational and universal nature of a sports community has certain practical significance and theoretical value. This study adopts social network analysis, which is specially designed to study social relationship variables, as a research tool. Starting from the relationships generated by the interactions among the members of the sparring community, the relationship data are analysed by using the UCINET software to reveal the network structure and group characteristics of the sparring community, identify the relationships between the key players and the members, and identify the characteristics of the relationships, the position of the members in the network, and cohesion, etc. The cohesive subgroups can be further explored through the cohesive subgroup analysis. The relationship between interpersonal networks (relationships) and the development of casual sparring communities is also explored through cohesive subgroup analyses. The results of the study show that the cohesive subgroups are very close to each other and that there are “bridges” between them. The better the connectivity of the network, the fewer the number of cohesive subgroups, and the hierarchical existence of individual members in the affective and informational networks, such as the third group’s affective network is 0.78, while the other groups are 1. This phenomenon reflects the asymmetrical nature of the relationship between members in the network, with individual members occupying an advantageous position and being dominant.