MEASURING A LARGE NETWORK QUICKLY

We describe work in which we used three days of interviewing to identi fy and measure the network among 200 people significant in a complex p roduction process. The capture-recapture strategy should be useful in other settings: (1) Conduct survey network interviews with people (inf ormants) positioned in the study population such that their contacts o verlap to provide recaptured relations. (2) Estimate reliability from data consistency across recaptures. (3) Triangulate relation response categories to assign quantitative scores to the categories. (4) Use re liability correlates to weight recaptured relations in the final netwo rk pooled across interviews. (5) Extrapolate from the known strengths of the captured relations to define the uncaptured relations.