what common feature do socio-grams share?

Answer 1

There are lots of different kinds of "graphs." Bar-charts, pie-charts, line and trend charts, and many other things are called graphs and/or graphics. Network analysis uses (primarily) one kind of graphic display that consists of points (or nodes) to represent actors and lines (or edges) to represent ties or relations. When sociologists borrowed this way of graphing things from the mathematicians, they re-named their graphics "socio-grams." Mathematicians know the kind of graphic displays by the names of "directed graphs" "signed graphs" or simply "graphs."

There are a number of variations on the theme of socio-grams, but they all share the common feature of using a labeled circle for each actor in the population we are describing, and line segments between pairs of actors to represent the observation that a tie exists between the two.