How (not) to measure social support networks

The name generator approach and the role relation approach are among the most common ways to measure ego-centered social networks. The name generator approach, which first requires of a respondent to name actual persons and then usually asks several additional questions about these persons gives richer data on the respondent's social network, but is, on the other hand, relatively costly and burdensome. On the other hand the role relation approach is simpler to use and probably less burdensome for the respondent (he/she names persons in his/her networks only in terms of their roles, e.g., partner, friend), but provides less precise data on the respondent's network (e.g., network composition and size). Previous experiments which compared both approaches with regard to network composition (proportions of family, friends, neighbors and co-workers) provide incomplete evidence because the two approaches differed in several methodological aspects (e.g., question wording, limitation of the number of named alters, ranking of named alters). In this article, an experiment was designed in which all factors that were found to interact with network composition and the two approaches were controlled for. Based on previous studies, several hypotheses were formulated and tested. Data were collected on a quota sample of 683 respondents by students at the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana in October and November 2008. Results show that, in general, differences in frequency distributions were not large. Provision of instrumental support is similar for both approaches, but larger differences appear in emotional, informational and work support. Differences were greater for strong ties and for the category "no one". Differences were also slightly larger for first choices. Dispersion of roles was slightly greater with the name generator approach. Results are discussed in comparison with previous findings.