Compare methods

	Positional Analysis	Triad Census
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1976	1970
Originator	Harrison White, Ronald Burt, and colleagues	Paul Holland & Samuel Leinhardt
Type	Framework for identifying network positions and the roles among them	Enumeration of the 16 isomorphism classes of directed triads
Seminal source	Burt, R. S. (1976). Positions in networks. Social Forces, 55(1), 93–122.	Holland, P. W., & Leinhardt, S. (1970). A method for detecting structure in sociometric data. American Journal of Sociology, 76(3), 492–513.
Aliases	role analysis, positional role analysis, network role and position analysis, regular equivalence analysis	triad count, triadic census, 16-type triad census, MAN triad census
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.	The triad census counts how many of a directed network's three-actor subgroups fall into each of the 16 possible types of triad, providing a compact fingerprint of the network's local structure. Introduced by Paul Holland and Samuel Leinhardt in 1970, it is the standard way to test structural theories — balance, clustering, transitivity, ranked clusters — by comparing the observed distribution of triad types against what a random network would produce.