Strengths and weaknesses of the Net-Map tool for participatory social network analysis in resource management: experience from case studies conducted on four continents

authored by

Barbara Schröter, Claudia Sattler, Frieder Graef, Cheng Chen, Estephania Delgadillo, Isabel Hackenberg, Ernestine M. Halle, Anika Hirt, Andreas Kubatzki, Bettina Matzdorf

Abstract

For researchers, conducting face-to-face interviews is always a challenge as it often turns into a one-way directed information retrieval. Therefore, interviewees not always are very motivated, enthusiastic and cooperative in responding to the questions. In the end, this has implications for the quality of the interview data. To improve the interview setting and the resulting data, in several projects the Net-Map tool was used to conduct participatory social network analysis. The tool is a combination of in-depth interviews and participatory network mapping. During the interviews, the interviewee draws the network of relevant actors, notes down their motivations and evaluates and displays the actors’ influence and benefits by building towers using any kind of stacks. In this research note, we present the strengths and weaknesses of the method against the experiences with applying the Net-Map tool on four different continents and give ideas for improvements and further research.

External Organisation(s)

Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF)
Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg

Type

Article

Journal

Methodological Innovations

Volume

11

Pages

2

Publication date

2018

Publication status

Published

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Sociology and Political Science, Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1177/2059799118787754 (Access: Open)