Project Details
Projekt
Surveying Panel Participants’ Network Members: Integration of Egocentric Data Collection and Respondent-Driven Sampling
Applicants
Dr. Carina Cornesse; Dr. Jean-Yves Gerlitz; Professor Dr. Olaf Groh-Samberg; Professorin Dr.-Ing. Sabine Zinn
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539569381
Individuals are embedded in their social contexts. Many large-scale multi-topic social surveys try to acknowledge this fact by incorporating multi-actor (MA) survey designs and ego-centric network (ECN) questionnaire modules into their data collection strategies. Using MA designs and ECN modules, researchers have gathered data on the general structure of people’s networks, the social resources available to them in those contexts, as well as some information on their relationship with a limited number of core network members (e.g. parents, partners, or children). While valuable, MA designs and ECN modules have two crucial limitations: a) their reliance on actor enumerations and proxy information provided by the central respondent ("ego") regarding their network members (alters), and b) the limited network scope, which usually only includes respondents’ strongest direct ties. Our study goal, therefore, is to supplement and enhance these strategies with respondent-driven samping (RDS). RDS is a network sampling strategy, where survey respondents serve as "seeds", who recruit their network members for participation in the survey, who in turn again recruit network members to the survey and so on, thus establishing referral chains. In this recruitment process, a link-tracing procedure is applied, which allows researchers to trace every recruit via their recruiters back to the initial seeds. Adding RDS to established network data strategies in a large-scale social survey will expand ist network analytical research potential, thus opening new data spaces for the social sciences. Questions, which can be addressed with this data, include a) whether and to what extent broader network bubbles exist (e.g., familial, regional, political), b) how strong, transitive, homogenous these network bubbles are, and c) how far from the initial respondents we have to go before their network bubbles burst and become heterogeneous. The submitted project has three goals: 1) survey practical innovation in terms achieving RDS success through ist effective combination with ECN modules and by establishing long referral chains, 2) developing and applying strategies for assessing and reducing bias in the resulting data, and 3) closing existing substantive research gaps regarding social networks in light of social cohesion. These goals will be achieved by adding an RDS procedure to the 2025 data collection wave of the German Social Cohesion Panel (SCP) and analyzing the resulting RDS data jointly with the SCP data.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
