Forgetting in the recall-based elicitation of personal and social networks

Forgetting in the recall-based elicitation of personal and social networks poses a potentially significant problem for the collection of complete network data and unbiased measurement of network characteristics and properties. A comprehensive review of the literature shows that forgetting is a pervasive, non-trivial phenomenon in the recall-based elicitation of personal and social networks pertaining to a broad variety of social relations. There appear to be no good predictors of individuals’ proportional level of forgetting, although the number of persons an individual recalls is moderately positively correlated with the number of persons he or she forgets. People seem to be more likely to forget weak ties than strong ties, but the evidence is mixed on this point. In any event, people still forget a significant proportion of their close contacts. Non-specific prompting for additional relevant persons, multiple elicitation questions, and re-interviewing enhance recall slightly to moderately and are the only methods currently available to counteract forgetting, albeit only partially. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. When researchers collect data on personal and social networks, they often ask people Ž . to recall others to whom they are tied in some way Marsden, 1990 . A potential problem with such recall data is that individuals may forget relevant persons in response Ž . to network elicitation questions Poole and Kochen, 1978 . Forgotten network ties would make recalled network data incomplete and possibly distort measurement of various characteristics and structural features of personal and social networks. With respect to Ž . forgetting and related concerns about recall data, Hammer 1984 called for more ‘‘ . . . research to clarify the principles that underlie the responses we elicit at social Ž . network interviews’’ p. 369 . She noted that persons recalled in network elicitation tasks are samples of the set of all persons who could be appropriately named and emphasized that researchers must take this fact into account in interpreting network data. Accordingly, in this paper, I first review the literature comprehensively to assess the extent and patterns of forgetting in recall-based elicitation of personal and social ) E-mail: [email protected] 0378-8733r00r$ see front matter q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Ž . PII: S0378-8733 99 00017-9 ( ) D.D. BrewerrSocial Networks 22 2000 29–43 30