Preliminary Results of the Niakhar Social Networks Pilot Survey

Steven Rytina, McGill University
John Sandberg, McGill University
Valerie Delaunay, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)
Richard Lalou, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)

This paper presents the first results from an innovative demographic social network survey fielded in rural Senegal. The design of this survey resolves a number of critical problems in previous network demographic research by linking the names network partners (alters) to demographic information collected on them by the Niakhar Demographic Surveillance System (DSS), maintained by L'Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) Senegal. We present here results concerning the process of linking alters named in the survey instrument to the DSS database, a separate validation instrument used to assess the validity of the name generators used to elicit alter names from respondents as well as substantive characteristics of the social networks themselves from the main survey instrument. These include the size and structure of networks across the 14 distinct but related domains of interaction for which alter names were collected, and measures of the physical and social proximity of alters.