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Measuring reciprocity: Double sampling, concordance, and network construction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2021

Elspeth Ready Open the ORCID record for Elspeth Ready [Opens in a new window]  and
Eleanor A. Power Open the ORCID record for Eleanor A. Power [Opens in a new window]
Elspeth Ready*
Affiliation:
Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
Eleanor A. Power
Affiliation:
Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, UK
*
*Corresponding author. Email: elspeth_ready@eva.mpg.de
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Abstract

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Reciprocity—the mutual provisioning of support/goods—is a pervasive feature of social life. Directed networks provide a way to examine the structure of reciprocity in a community. However, measuring social networks involves assumptions about what relationships matter and how to elicit them, which may impact observed reciprocity. In particular, the practice of aggregating multiple sources of data on the same relationship (e.g., “double-sampled” data, where both the “giver” and “receiver” are asked to report on their relationship) may have pronounced impacts on network structure. To investigate these issues, we examine concordance (ties reported by both parties) and reciprocity in a set of directed, double-sampled social support networks. We find low concordance in people’s responses. Taking either the union (including any reported ties) or the intersection (including only concordant ties) of double-sampled relationships results in dramatically higher levels of reciprocity. Using multilevel exponential random graph models of social support networks from 75 villages in India, we show that these changes cannot be fully explained by the increase in the number of ties produced by layer aggregation. Respondents’ tendency to name the same people as both givers and receivers of support plays an important role, but this tendency varies across contexts and relationships type. We argue that no single method should necessarily be seen as the “correct” choice for aggregation of multiple sources of data on a single relationship type. Methods of aggregation should depend on the research question, the context, and the relationship in question.

Keywords

social networksreciprocityconcordancedouble samplinginformant accuracy
Type
Research Article
Information
Network Science , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 387 - 402
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Footnotes

Action Editor: Ulrik Brandes

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