Louisa Reins, Ruben Arslan and Tanja Gerlach

Assessing egocentered social networks in formr: a tutorial

Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science

In psychological science, egocentered social networks are assessed to investigate the patterning and development of social relationships. In this approach, a focal individual is typically asked to report the people they interact with in specific contexts and to provide additional information on those interaction partners and the relationships with them. While egocentered social networks hold considerable promise to investigate various interesting questions at the heart of relationship science and beyond, their implementation can be challenging. This tutorial provides researchers with detailed instructions on how to set up a study involving egocentered social networks online using the open-source software formr. By including a fully-functional study template for the assessment of social networks and extensions to this design, we hope to equip researchers from different backgrounds with the tools necessary to collect social network data tailored to their research needs.

Preprint available at https://psyarxiv.com/qg6uv/. Open material available at https://osf.io/sgkwz/.