  According to the small-world concept, the entire world is connected through
short chains of acquaintances. In popular imagination this is captured in the
phrase six degrees of separation, implying that any two individuals are, at
most, six handshakes away. Social network analysis is the understanding of
concepts and information on relationships among interacting units in an
ecological system. In this analysis the properties of the actors are explained
in terms of the structures of links amongst them. In general, the relational
links between the actors are primary and the properties of the actors are
secondary. This paper presents two methods to calculate the average degree of
separation between the actors or nodes in a graph. We apply this approach to
other random graphs depicting social networks and then compare the
characteristics of these graphs with the average degree of separation.
