Asking social network questions

Abstract

Research findings indicate that different types of social relations have an important influence on the performance of employees in organisations. This paper focuses on a comparison of different methods for acquiring information on advice, cooperation, friendship, adversarial and superficial networks in knowledge organisations. We investigate the applicability of three distinct measurement methods to acquire different kinds of complete network data by means of the recognition method. Data were collected in a small governmental organisation consisting of knowledge workers. First, employees were presented a short description of a specific situation in which social relations with their colleagues might play a significant role. They had to indicate if (or how often) this specific situation occurred with each of the colleagues. Second, respondents were asked to indicate whether a specific relational concept (in this case 'advice' or 'friendship') applied to each of their relations with their colleagues. Third, we provided respondents with four semantic differentials (e.g. distrust-trust) on which they needed to position their relation with the other employees. Whether these different measurement instruments capture distinct aspects of the relation between employees, or whether they measure the same underlying concepts, is one of the major concerns of this paper. The aim of this paper is twofold. First of all, we want to know to what extent these different measurement instruments overlap. Second, we would like to find out to what degree these different methods as a whole give us conceptually different and complementary information. To the extent that items are correlated within one method and between methods we need to investigate which of these different instruments is best suited for our content related purposes. The criteria used for selecting the most appropriate method are minimal item non-response – i.e. from the viewpoint of measuring complete networks – and maximum relational diversity with a minimum of questions.