Informant Accuracy in Social Network Data. II.

Abstract

This paper repeats and confirms the results of a 1976 study, 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.

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 1976
Accession Number
ADA026645

Entities

People

  • H. Russell Bernard
  • Peter D. Killworth

Organizations

  • West Virginia University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Cooperation
  • Data Science
  • Experimental Design
  • Information Science
  • Maintenance
  • Monitoring
  • Social Networks

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Organizational Psychology.