Your first question raises a methodological point that I have grappled with since starting to use SNA to understand information flows in both value chains and innovation systems. When asking farmers about their information sources I generally get a mixture of specific (individual) names, organisational names and also vague references to groups such as neighbours, NGOs or extension agents. From a communication perspective I find this interesting as it represents the relationships between formal and informal information sources and also shows that sometimes farmers associate more with individual extension agents than with the institution providing the service – in one study in which I asked farmers to name both the extension agent and their organisation one particular actor was named in association with 4or5 organisations and was clearly the key broker in the network. Feedback interviews confirmed that he had changed organisational affiliation regularly but this had not reduced his influence on the innovation system. My own solution to this formal-informal dilemma is to ask respondents for both individual and organisational names and to include vague references but to give them all the same attribute code so it is possible to see their influence in the network but they are also easy to remove from the network to conduct metric calculations.

With regard to the use of binary coding – it is possible to use valued coding and increase the value of ties to represent an increasing scale. I also use value coding to give qualitatitive values in the context of agricultural information 1= soil management, 2= seed varieties, 3 = planting etc. Again this is obvioulsy unsuitable for calculating metrics but Ucinet will allow you to calculate binary metrics in valued networks.

Thanks for the link about VNA Patti, am very excited to check that out.

Hope this is useful
Louise

With respect to your question about mapping the relationships among actors (farmers, extension agents, etc), the tool that you want to look at is Value Network Analysis (VNA). I use VNA very often in conjunction with an SNA. Whereas SNA can show you the interpersonal relationships, the VNA shows how tangible and intangible value flows between the actors.

See: http://valuenetworks.com/, a paper describing the method is available at: http://www.openvna.com/howToGuides/A_ValueNetwork_Approach.pdf (I also describe the method myself in my book, Net Work.)

Verna Allee and the VNA consortium have just released a toolkit for drawing and analyzing maps.

I use both SNA and VNA in my practice, they are very complementary.

best regards,

/patti anklam