Impact of methods for reducing respondent burden on personal network structural measures

✍ Scribed by Christopher McCarty; Peter D. Killworth; James Rennell

• Book ID: 104093086
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 1004 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0378-8733
• DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2006.12.005

✦ Synopsis

We examine methods for reducing respondent burden in evaluating alter-alter ties on a set of network structural measures. The data consist of two sets, each containing 45 alters from respondent free lists: the first contains 447 personal networks, and the second 554. Respondents evaluated the communication between 990 alter pairs. The methods were (1) dropping alters from the end of the free-list, (2) randomly dropping alters, (3) randomly dropping links, and (4) predicting ties based on transitivity. For some measures network structure is captured with samples of less than 20 alters; other measures are less consistent. Researchers should be aware of the need to sample a minimum number of alters to capture structural variation.