A network analytic approach

The purpose of this contribution to the "car challenge" is to apply "network analysis" to make (some) sense of brand switching data. To describe or interpret attitudes and behaviors "network analysis" refers to concepts like centrality, cohesion, structural equivalence, brokerage, bridging, variously defining the position of individuals or organizations within the system they are embedded into. In this contribution we take a descriptive approach, without attempting to explain or interpret data, as endogeneous or exogeneous variables, although this approach is somehow out of line with more recent and already well established trends in "network analysis" that is increasingly concerned with interpretations, beyond the descriptive stage.