Egonet is a program for the collection and analysis of egocentric network data. If you are new to ego-centered networks please read over the Introduction to Ego-centered networks page (link to the Introduction to Ego-centered Networks). This software will assist you in creating the questionnaire, collecting the data and providing general global network measures and data matrixes that can be used in further analysis by other software programs.
Egonet is divided into two modules. The first module, called EgoNetW, creates the questionnaire itself. The second module, called EgoNetClientW, is used for the actual data collection.
Both of these modules are Java programs and requires that Java be installed on each station that the program is used on. EgoNetW has four modules. The first module creates questions that you ask respondents about themselves, the second module is for network elicitation to identify people in a respondent's network (alter), the third unit consists of questions you ask the respondent about each alter and the last element contains questions asking respondents about the relationship between each unique pair of alters.
EgoNetClientW is the program to conduct the interview using the study you created with EgoNetW and can be run on any computer that has the software installed. This unit uses the questionairre developed with the EgoNetW program for gathering the data. It is possible to share questionnaire files so that a set of questions developed by one researcher can be used by other researchers to duplicate a study exactly as it was originally designed. Note that over time a library of questions can be built up so that programming a study could become borrowing pieces from other work and customizing them to your particular research needs.
After the study is created and the data has been collected, the EgoNetClientW program produces several output summary statistics. It also generates an adjacency matrix for each respondent that can be used in most statistical programs for further analysis.
As this is a beta version of the program any feedback would be greatly appreciated on any aspect of the software. It is free to use, however I would like to refrain from distributing it widely until the bugs are fixed. Ultimately I would like to seek funding to upgrade this based on the feedback of users and I intend to distribute this software freely to the social network community.
Chris McCarty