TY - JOUR
T1 - Comparing Social Network Structures Generated through Sociometric and Ethnographic Methods
AU - Ready, Elspeth
AU - Habecker, Patrick
AU - Abadie, Roberto
AU - Dávila-Torres, Carmen A.
AU - Rivera-Villegas, Angélica
AU - Khan, Bilal
AU - Dombrowski, Kirk
N1 - Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation program for Enhancing Access to Radio Spectrum (#1443985 and #1638618) and in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (R01DA037117).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
PY - 2020/11/1
Y1 - 2020/11/1
N2 - Social connections between individuals are often an important source of information for both quantitative and qualitative anthropological research. Here, we seek to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of sociometric and ethnographic representations of social connections. We do this by comparing network data collected using a sociometric technique (a name generator) with a network drawn by project ethnographers representing their understanding of social structure in the study population. We find many similarities in the two networks, but they offer somewhat different perspectives into the local social structure. Although the ethnographic network is shaped by the ethnographers’ deeper knowledge of a subset of network members, individuals with high degree (but not betweenness) in the sociometric network are generally present in the ethnographic network. The ethnographers’ interpretation of the factors that lead to high degree centrality in the network is broadly accurate. However, the sociometric network is characterized by a high level of transitivity not seen in the ethnographic network. We consider the importance of the differences we observe for ethnographic practice.
AB - Social connections between individuals are often an important source of information for both quantitative and qualitative anthropological research. Here, we seek to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of sociometric and ethnographic representations of social connections. We do this by comparing network data collected using a sociometric technique (a name generator) with a network drawn by project ethnographers representing their understanding of social structure in the study population. We find many similarities in the two networks, but they offer somewhat different perspectives into the local social structure. Although the ethnographic network is shaped by the ethnographers’ deeper knowledge of a subset of network members, individuals with high degree (but not betweenness) in the sociometric network are generally present in the ethnographic network. The ethnographers’ interpretation of the factors that lead to high degree centrality in the network is broadly accurate. However, the sociometric network is characterized by a high level of transitivity not seen in the ethnographic network. We consider the importance of the differences we observe for ethnographic practice.
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U2 - 10.1177/1525822X20945499
DO - 10.1177/1525822X20945499
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85089361895
VL - 32
SP - 416
EP - 432
JO - Field Methods
JF - Field Methods
SN - 1525-822X
IS - 4
ER -