SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING CONSUMERS ATTITUDES CONTAGION (Marketingowe badanie zgodnosci i zarazliwosci postaw konsu-menckich na podstawie analizy sieci spolecznych)

The article proposes a marketing research method for investigating both consumer attitudes and network of social relations. The analysis of literature has identified three mechanisms explaining the similarity among people connected in a social network: homophily, confounding and social contagion. Among the three mechanisms, only social contagion is influenced by the direction of the relations. Therefore analyzing correlations between attitudes in the Ego network separately for different types of relations (outgoing, incoming and mutual), we can infer the social contagion of the consumers' attitude. The article contains a proposal of a method and procedure for identifying consumers' attitudes contagion by identifying and analyzing customers' social network.