Reliability and Validity of Measuring Social Support Networks by Web and Telephone

Egocentered networks are common in social science research. Here, the unit of analysis is a respondent (ego) together with his/her personal network (alters). Usually, several variables are measured to describe the relationship between egos and alters. In this paper, the aim is to estimate the reliability and validity of the averages of these measures by the multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) approach. In the study, web and telephone modes of data collection are compared on a convenience sample of 238 second year students at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana. The data was collected in 2003. The results show that the telephone mode produces more reliable data than the web mode of data collection. Also, method order effect was shown: the data collection mode used first produces data of lower reliability than the mode used for the second measurement. There were no large differences in validity of measurement.