Compare methods

	Positional Analysis	Homophily Analysis
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1976	1954 (concept); 2001 (synthesis)
Originator	Harrison White, Ronald Burt, and colleagues	Lazarsfeld & Merton (concept); McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook (synthesis)
Type	Framework for identifying network positions and the roles among them	Measurement of similarity-based tie formation
Seminal source	Burt, R. S. (1976). Positions in networks. Social Forces, 55(1), 93–122.	McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 415–444.
Aliases	role analysis, positional role analysis, network role and position analysis, regular equivalence analysis	homophily measurement, assortative mixing analysis, birds-of-a-feather analysis, tie-similarity analysis
Related	5	4
Summary	Positional analysis is the network-analytic program that identifies the positions actors occupy — sets of actors equivalent in their relational patterns — and characterizes the system of roles that links those positions. Growing out of Harrison White's structuralism and Ronald Burt's operationalization in the 1970s, it treats the social structure as a small set of positions and the role relations among them, rather than as a collection of individual actors.	Homophily analysis quantifies the tendency of similar individuals to form ties — the principle that 'birds of a feather flock together'. It compares the rate at which people connect with others who share an attribute (race, gender, age, education, attitudes) against what would be expected by chance, distinguishing the homophily that arises merely from group sizes from the genuine, behavior-driven preference for similar others.