Compare methods

	Name Generator Method	Structural Holes Analysis
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1984 (GSS network module)	1992
Originator	Survey network methodology; Ronald Burt (GSS module)	Ronald S. Burt
Type	Survey instrument for eliciting personal-network members and attributes	Ego-network measure of brokerage opportunity and constraint
Seminal source	Burt, R. S. (1984). Network items and the General Social Survey. Social Networks, 6(4), 293–339.	Burt, R. S. (1992). Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 978-0-674-84371-4
Aliases	name generator, name interpreter, egocentric network survey, personal network name generator	structural holes, Burt constraint, network constraint analysis, effective size analysis
Related	5	5
Summary	The name generator is the standard survey technique for collecting egocentric (personal) network data. A respondent (ego) is prompted to name the people (alters) with whom they have a specified kind of relationship — those with whom they discuss important matters, exchange support, or socialize. A follow-up battery of name-interpreter questions then records each alter's attributes and the ties among the alters, yielding measures of network size, composition, density, and diversity for each respondent.	Structural holes analysis, developed by Ronald Burt, measures the brokerage opportunities available to an actor by examining the gaps — structural holes — between their otherwise disconnected contacts. An actor whose contacts do not know each other bridges non-redundant sources of information and control and is said to be rich in structural holes; an actor whose contacts are all interconnected is constrained. The core measures — network constraint, effective size, and efficiency — quantify how much advantage an ego's network structure confers.