Recently, I was called to document quality control / quality assurance steps for a public relations / communications research proposal. I thought it was a useful topic, and worth summarizing some of what I’ve learned over 15 years of scientific research administration and working as a PR / marketing research consultant. In no [...]

Last February, I posted about an automated sensor/logger device by researchers at MIT for the purpose of automated real-time discovery of human social networks. As interesting as that device is - and the implications for smaller, cheaper successor devices - I believe that the trend toward increasing computing power, location sensitivity, and “friend discovery” [...]

Recently, Wired posted an article that demonstrates that the USDOD’s struggle with social media continues unabated - “Air Force Backtracks on Social Network Ban“.
Part of the problem is generational, and part of it is organizational. The generational part is the military is coming to a crash realization that the latest wave of recruits are [...]

The concepts of “betweenness centrality” and “structural holes” are some of the most powerful in the social network analysis toolset (pun intended - but forgive me for lumping the two concepts together for this post). In a nutshell, high betweenness indicates that the overall network is disproportionally reliant on an individual for [...]

About eight years ago, I wrote a paper for CUED (now the International Economic Development Council) entitled “Methods for Generating Useful Databases when Industry Codes Fail.” The gist of the paper was that most industry and market data is available based upon NAICS industry classifications or some similar proxy. Forecasted and estimated employment, [...]

I was recently visiting with Ken and Elaine Lyons, the founders of the Independent Data Collection Center about telephone surveys, particularly CATI (computer assisted telephone interviews). The IDCC specializes in providing rigorously dependable and statistically valid data from focus groups, phone surveys, and other data collection methods, allowing researchers to just focus on [...]

Online ethnographic research is finally getting some signficant academic attention. I believe I have a little perspective on the subject; I have co-authored a chapter on the subject of “electronic ethnography” in two editions of an anthropology textbook, “Doing Cultural Anthropology” (M. Angrosino, ed.). In preparing for an edition update, I had collected some [...]