Everyday explanations of social phenomena, such as examination failure, do not rely on single causes, but rather on a variety of factors indicative of a complex relationship between a variety of causes and effects. While there are many possible explanations of examination failure, in order to obtain a fuller understanding of these explanations, it is necessary to discover how these causes link together, and the extent to which they interact or cause one another. One method that can be used to investigate the causes people give for events such as exam failure is network analysis. Network analysis can help disclose the relationships between a series of causal factors, even when these links are non-linear in nature (Breakwell & Canter, 1993)