Surveys of egocentric networks are especially vulnerable to methods effects. This study combines a true experiment—random assignment of respondents to receive essentially identical questions from either an in-person interviewer or an online survey—with audio recordings of the in-person interviews. We asked over 850 respondents from a general population several different name-eliciting questions. Face-to-face interviews yielded more cooperation and higher-quality data but fewer names than did the web surveys. Exploring several explanations, we determine that interviewer differences account for the mode difference: Interviewers who consistently prompted respondents elicited as many alters as did the web survey and substantially more than did less active interviewers. Although both methods effects substantially influenced the volume of alters listed, they did not substantially modify associations of other variables with volume.

中文翻译：

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自我中心网络研究中的模式和访谈者效应

对自我中心网络的调查特别容易受到方法的影响。这项研究结合了真实的实验——随机分配受访者，从现场采访者或在线调查中接收基本相同的问题——与现场采访的录音。我们向来自普通人群的 850 多名受访者提出了几个不同的引出名字的问题。与网络调查相比，面对面访谈产生了更多的合作和更高质量的数据，但姓名更少。在探索了几种解释后，我们确定采访者的差异导致了模式的差异：持续提示受访者的采访者引起的改变与网络调查一样多，而且比不太活跃的采访者引起的改变要多得多。尽管这两种方法的效果都显着影响了列出的改变的数量，但它们并没有显着改变其他变量与数量的关联。