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

McCarty, Christopher, Killworth, Peter D. and Rennell, James (2007) Impact of methods for reducing respondent burden on personal network structural measures. Social Networks, 29 (2), 300-315. (doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2006.12.005).

Abstract

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.

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