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| Date: | Sat, 31 May 2014 17:30:00 +0200 |
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This is Petya Slavova, a sociologist from the Department of Sociology, Sofia University, Bulgaria and a member of the IMPRESA project team.
I would like to comment on Message 72 by Matthieu Stigler,Dominique Barjolle and Sylvain Quiédeville.
In my view the usefulness of social network analysis (SNA) in ex post impact assessment (epIA) of case studies is problematic for several reasons:
- As mentioned in Message 72, SNA cannot tell us anything about the use of information which was transmitted among the actors in the network and this is exactly that we want to know, i.e. how and why some information can be transformed into a useful tool for creation and diffusion of innovations while other information stays just as "an information".
- I am not convinced that we need to use quantitative method such as SNA to explain qualitative types of phenomenon like case studies on creation and the diffusion of innovations. The creation and diffusion of innovation is something which comprises different type of actors but their number is usually limited. So we need to know much more about their characteristics and contribution to creation and diffusion of innovation and less about their number, and about the number of links between them. The creation and diffusion of innovation can be quantified but we should know why we need this. What is the purpose to do that? To understand the leadership relationships in a small community, or powerful relationships, or to know the centrality of one actor in the small networks (20-30 actors) we do not need sophisticated quantitative techniques such as SNA.
- The creation and diffusion of innovation is a process, and SNA is not a suitable tool to study the development of the phenomenon as a process (it can be done but it is time and cost consuming).
- We will make epIA and we should ask the actors about their concrete and simple activities in the past. SNA work with this type of data - simple and singular actions which need to be codified in numbers. For example, if we want to study the distribution of information among the actors i.e. to measure the centrality or the powerfulness of the actors we need to ask our respondents "to whom did you sent information" and "from whom did you receive information". The problem is that such questions may not work well because they need something to be remembered comprehensively and in varying details and the collection of non-reliable data poses serious methodological problems. Moreover, the creation and diffusion of innovation is highly competitive and sometimes people are not willing to share information about who exactly did something, because of professional competition.
Dr. Petya Slavova
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Sofia University
125 Tzarigradsko shose Blvd.
bl.4, office 425
1113 Sofia,
Bulgaria
tel: + 359 878 11 35 98
e-mail: pslavova (at) ulb.ac.be
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