Susan,
Allen Tien and his company MD Logic have been working on developing a software
system precisely for this purpose. - Tom V.

Susan Watkins wrote:

> Does anyone know if it is possible to construct (or approximate) complete
> network data in a village using information about ego-centric networks
> (size 4) that have been collected for all individuals in this village? It
> seems that there should be a matching algorithm that fills in the nxn
> matrix of relations among village members (where n is the number of
> respondents in the village) on the basis of the reported ego-centric
> networks and the characteristics of network partners (e.g. schooling,
> number of children, etc; unfortunately, no exact indentification of
> network partners is available in the data).  In principle (and perhaps
> easily in practice, depending on software) this information could be
> sufficient to estimate complete network matrices (or structural
> characteristics of these village matricies, such as density).  Since it is
> clear that the village matrices are not completely identified by the
> information provided by ego-centeric networks, the analysis needs to
> incorporate the uncertainty in the estimation of village matrices.
>
> Has anybody tried to translate from egocentric to full community networks?
> Is there software for this?
>
> Susan Watkins

--
Thomas W. Valente, PhD
Director, Master of Public Health Program
http://www.usc.edu/hsc/medicine/preventive_med/ipr/mph/
Department of  Preventive Medicine
School of Medicine
University of Southern California
1000 Fremont Ave.
Building A Room 5133
Alhambra CA 91803
phone: (626) 457-6678
fax: (626) 457-6699
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