On the structural equivalence of coresidents and the measurement of village social structure

Researchers in the social and biomedical sciences regularly measure networks spanning entire villages in low- and middle-income countries by documenting the social contacts of just one or two representatives from participating households. This “lean” approach to network measurement is cost-effective compared to a sociometric census of a village’s adult population. However, it implicitly assumes that interviewed and non-interviewed coresidents are structurally equivalent — i.e., directly connected to the same network members in the same fashion. Drawing from research on multilevel networks and intra-household heterogeneity, here I argue that this assumption is unlikely to hold for the personal social ties typically of interest to field researchers (i.e., friends and other preferred sources and targets of material, informational and emotional support). I substantiate my claim with an exploratory case study on the similarity of coresidents’ incoming and outgoing ties using data documenting unrestricted roster-based reports on the provision of tangible aid amongst all adult residents of a remote village of indigenous horticulturalists in Nicaragua (108 adults; 32 nuclear-family households). Results indicate that coresidents markedly deviate from structural equivalence and its generalisation in the form of stochastic equivalence (i.e., similar probabilities of being directly connected to the same network members in the same fashion). All in all, it is ill-advised to assume that the personal network of any one coresident, or, more generally, the manner in which a coresident tends to send and receive their personal ties, is representative of their household.