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 netw ork data and unbiased measurement of network characteristics and properties . A comprehensive review of the literature shows that forgetting is a perva sive, non-trivial phenomenon in the recall-based elicitation of personal an d social networks pertaining to a broad variety of social relations. There appear to be no good predictors of individuals' proportional level of forge tting, although the number of persons an individual recalls is moderately p ositively correlated with the number of persons he or she forgets. People s eem to be more likely to forget weak ties than strong ties, but the evidenc e is mixed on this point. In any event, people still forget a significant p roportion of their close contacts. Non-specific prompting for additional re levant 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. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.