Recent Developments in Network Measurement

This chapter considers study design and data collection methods for social network studies, emphasizing methodological research and applications that have appeared since an earlier review (Marsden 1990). It concentrates on methods and instruments for measuring social relationships linking actors or objects. Many analytical techniques discussed in other chapters identify patterns and regularities that measure structural properties of networks (such as centralization or global density), and/or relational properties of particular objects/actors within them (such as centrality or local density). The focus here is on acquiring the elementary data elements themselves.