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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Thu, 29 May 2014 14:06:19 +0200
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This is Silvia Andrea Perez again, responding to a request from a conference subscriber for a brief easily understandable description of social network analysis (SNA). I try and do this here. 

When you want to do SNA for ex post impact assessment (epIA), let's say of farmers who are adopting the positive selection technology on potatoes, what I did was to go and interview the group of farmers. I used a semi-structured questionnaire to ask farmers various things:

1. Who was training them on the positive selection technology (let's say person A)

2. The names of the people who were going to the training (A, B, C, D, names of the extension agent, the farmers and other people)

3. I ask each person to name one person with whom he/she had more interactions with (B,C,D,A)

4. What kind of interactions (for sharing knowledge, sharing agricultural inputs, etc).

5. What was the frequency of the interactions 

6. What were the outcomes of those interactions (clean seeds, not so much difference, not any difference) 

7. etc.

These are questions just to give you a simple example. If you want to track changes over time, you can collect data in at least two phases over the process.

Then what I do with the data is to put it in MS excel, with the specification of different indicators that you want to observe. Then the matrices generated in excel are exported to a software for conducting social network analysis (UCINET and Netdraw for visualisation of networks), so with this software I generate the networks.

When you visualise the networks (the "picture" of interactions) you can assess if A had interactions with B, C, D and if B, C, D interacted with A, or among themselves. You can see in the network what was the direction of interactions, if A had a top down approach with farmers over time, or if farmers were also interacting with A, and with other peers. The direction of interactions is useful as an indicator to show whether the learning process was participatory or with a top down approach. You can also observe if there were farmers who were not participating. So in the network they would be like isolated dots.

This is more or less how I am applying it in my research.

I would recommend this book: 
Analysing social networks. Stephen P. Borgatti, Martin G. Everett and Jeffrey C Johnson. Sage, London. 2013.

Silvia Andrea Perez Perdomo 
Hollandseweg 1
Building 201
Office number 5057
P.O. Box 8130
Wageningen University
6700 EW Wageningen, 
The Netherlands
http://wu.academia.edu/SilviaAndreaPérezPerdomo 
e-mail: silvia.perezperdomo (at) wur.nl

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