Abstract
In psychological science, ego-centered social networks are assessed to investigate the patterning and development of social relationships. In this approach, a focal individual is typically asked to report the people they interact with in specific contexts and to provide additional information on those interaction partners and the relationships with them. Although ego-centered social networks hold considerable promise for investigating various interesting questions from psychology and beyond, their implementation can be challenging. This tutorial provides researchers with detailed instructions on how to set up a study involving ego-centered social networks online using the open-source software formr. By including a fully functional study template for the assessment of social networks and extensions to this design, we hope to equip researchers from different backgrounds with the tools necessary to collect social-network data tailored to their research needs.
Highlights
The investigation of social networks, which describe the interactions and relationships among finite sets of individuals, is a research tool that can prove valuable for researchers from various fields of psychology and beyond
Whereas more traditional survey approaches often focus on individuals only, the social-network approach aims to investigate the behavior and attitudes of individuals in relation to their social relationships and interactions, acknowledging the important role social contexts often play for individual-level outcomes
The investigation of ego-centered social networks can be used to examine questions that would not be available via survey approaches that focus on individuals only
Summary
All materials used in this tutorial have been made publicly available via the OSF and can be accessed at https:// osf.io/sgkwz/. You may want to consult previous studies that have employed ego-centered networks for typical as well as maximum network sizes (again, you may refer to Table A1 in the Appendix for a quick overview of the network sizes elicited in a selection of previous studies) Another way to approach this would be to pilot your method of assessing your network of interest (including your name generators) in a small sample of face-to-face interviews. Let us start with having a look at the survey spreadsheet defining the part of our sample study that contains the assessment of the social network (the survey spreadsheet named “networks_template_networks_part1”). In row 6 of the survey table, we define another item of the type “select_one” to ask for the relationship the participant has with the listed person. Make sure to increase the numbers in the variable names and showif column by 1 for each new person
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