Abstract
Researchers in the social and biomedical sciences regularly measure networks spanning entire villages in low- and middle-income countries by documenting the social contacts of just one or two representatives from participating households. This “lean” approach to network measurement is cost-effective compared to a sociometric census of a village’s adult population. However, it implicitly assumes that interviewed and non-interviewed coresidents are structurally equivalent — i.e., directly connected to the same network members in the same fashion. Drawing from research on multilevel networks and intra-household heterogeneity, here I argue that this assumption is unlikely to hold for the personal social ties typically of interest to field researchers (i.e., friends and other preferred sources and targets of material, informational and emotional support). I substantiate my claim with an exploratory case study on the similarity of coresidents’ incoming and outgoing ties using data documenting unrestricted roster-based reports on the provision of tangible aid amongst all adult residents of a remote village of indigenous horticulturalists in Nicaragua (108 adults; 32 nuclear-family households). Results indicate that coresidents markedly deviate from structural equivalence and its generalisation in the form of stochastic equivalence (i.e., similar probabilities of being directly connected to the same network members in the same fashion). All in all, it is ill-advised to assume that the personal network of any one coresident, or, more generally, the manner in which a coresident tends to send and receive their personal ties, is representative of their household.
Highlights
Across the social and biomedical sciences, there is growing interest in cataloguing all relationships between all adults in spatially distinct local populations — i.e., the measurement of networks spanning whole villages.1 Such efforts, in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), hold great promise for researchers hoping to use villagers’ social ties to address pressing issues around health and international development like the uptake of antibiotics (Haenssgen et al, 2018), mass drug administration (Chami et al, 2017), neonatal mortality (Shakya et al, 2017a), the adverse effects of food insecurity (Perkins et al, 2018), the efficacy of microfinance initiatives (Banerjee et al, 2013) and risk sharing (Caudell et al, 2015)
Past scholarship around intra-household dynamics and my exploratory case study on coresidence and network position in Arang Dak both indicate that adults who live together are unlikely to substantially approach the ideal of structural equivalence or its generalisation in the form of stochastic equivalence in an individual-level village-wide network
Field researchers planning to measure relations that do not naturally sit at the level of the household run the risk of overlooking information on the connectivity of villagers should they assume that the egocentric network of any one coresident, or, more generally, the manner in which a coresident tends to send and receive their ties, is representative of their home
Summary
Social Networks xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx of the network of interest (Larson and Lewis, 2020; Perkins et al, 2015) and, in turn, ensure the unbiased assessment of structural properties (Marsden, 1990; Smith and Moody, 2013; Smith et al, 2017) This strategy offers the most analytical flexibility as a field researcher could, for example, subset an inter-individual village-wide network based on the traits of resident sub-populations (e.g., married women of reproductive age) or simplify this network in line with household membership by agglomerating coresidents’ incoming and outgoing ties. Relations (i.e., How should the ties constituting a village-wide network of interest be elicited?) and boundary delineation (i.e., What are the limits of a “village”?) are not addressed.
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