INFORMANT ACCURACY IN SOCIAL NETWORK DATA II

Abstract

This paper repeats and confirms the results of Kill worth and Bernard (1976), concerning informants'ability to report their communication accurately. A variety of self-monitoring, or nearly self-monitoring, networks are used for this study. The conclusion again appears that people do not know, with any accuracy, those with whom they communicate. The expanded experimental design permits a variety of other, related questions to be answered: recall of past communication is not significantly more accurate than prediction of future communication; no one set of data is more accurate than any other; the maintenance of personal logs of communication does not improve accuracy; informants do not know if they are accurate or not; there is no reason to choose either rankings or scalings as a data instrument save for convenience. It is suggested that future research should concentrate both on improving the accuracy of data-gathering instruments and on lessening the reliance of data-processing instruments on precise data.

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