Measuring a large network quickly

Abstract We describe work in which we used three days of interviewing to identify and measure the network among 200 people significant in a complex production process. The capture-recapture strategy should be useful in other settings: (1) Conduct survey network interviews with people (informants) positioned in the study population such that their contacts overlap to provide recaptured relations. (2) Estimate reliability from data consistency across recaptures. (3) Triangulate relation response categories to assign quantitative scores to the categories. (4) Use reliability correlates to weight recaptured relations in the final network pooled across interviews. (5) Extrapolate from the known strengths of the captured relations to define the uncaptured relations.

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