INFORMANT ACCURACY IN SOCIAL NETWORK DATA II

This paper repeats and confirms the results of Kill worth and Bernard (1976), concerning informants'ability to report their communication accurately. A variety of self‐monitoring, or nearly self‐monitoring, networks are used for this study. The conclusion again appears that people do not know, with any accuracy, those with whom they communicate. The expanded experimental design permits a variety of other, related questions to be answered: recall of past communication is not significantly more accurate than prediction of future communication; no one set of data is more accurate than any other; the maintenance of personal logs of communication does not improve accuracy; informants do not know if they are accurate or not; there is no reason to choose either rankings or scalings as a data instrument save for convenience. It is suggested that future research should concentrate both on improving the accuracy of data‐gathering instruments and on lessening the reliance of data‐processing instruments on precise data.