Comparing Four Different Methods for Measuring Personal Social Networks *

Like many researchers, we want to know the rules that govern the formation of human social networks, their persistence and disappearance, and their effects (if any) on human behavior and thought. Even if it turns out that the rules governing social network formation and decay are relatively simple, the outcome of those rules is very complex. It is so complex, in fact, that at this stage of the effort we are still concentrating on basic questions like: How many people are there in