FIND DATA: By Author | Journal | Sites   ANALYZE DATA: Help with R | SPSS | Stata | Excel   WHAT'S NEW? US Politics | Int'l Relations | Law & Courts
   FIND DATA: By Author | Journal | Sites   WHAT'S NEW? US Politics | IR | Law & Courts
If this link is broken, please report as broken. You can also submit updates (will be reviewed).
Online Social Ties Mirror Offline Relationships: Implications for Political Science Research
Insights from the Field
social networks
experimental methods
external validity
tie similarity
Methodology
APSR
8 R files
6 Stata files
16 PDF files
19 datasets
4 LaTeX files
6 text files
Dataverse
Testing Social Science Network Theories With Online Network Data: An Evaluation of External Validity was authored by James Bisbee and Jennifer Larson. It was published by Cambridge in APSR in 2017.

### The Question

Does social network data gathered online accurately reflect real-world offline relationships?

### Our Approach

This article directly compares online and offline social ties, using novel experimental methods. We collected data on both types of connections to test external validity.

### Key Finding

We found strong similarity between online and offline relationships despite their different contexts. The nature of these ties appears consistent across domains.

### Why It Matters

These results confirm that online network data can effectively test long-standing theories in political science about social networks' role in collective action.

data
Find on Google Scholar
Find on JSTOR
Find on CUP
American Political Science Review
Podcast host Ryan