Relationship between Behavior and Recall

The question of whether we, as individuals, are reliable sources of information concerning our behavior has been debated for many decades in social network research. Because most research in this field uses individuals’ recollection of their behavior as a source of data (Marsden, 2005), assessing the reliability of our informants is not a trivial issue. This study focuses on comparing individuals’ actual behavior to their recall of that behavior. As such, I am not concerned with perception-based networks (e.g., friendship or trust) because they do not have to be related to the occurrence or frequency of a specific behavior. The reliability of individual recollection is, however, critical for research that relies on an accurate account of interactions between individuals. For example, the study of the diffusion of information relies on the account by informants of their actual communication behavior – was the message transmitted? – and not just on the interactions that they can recall.

Existing research comparing behavior and recall has mainly sought to understand how and why recall and behavior differ from each other at the individual or dyadic level. The BKS studies – a series of articles published by Bernard, Killworth, and Sailer (1979, 1981, 1982) – are the main body of work in this strand of research. They made an early attempt to assess the reliability of informants by observing the communication behavior of several groups of actors in different contexts and comparing it to the interactions that the actors reported during the same period of time. Their findings showed that respondents had a poor recollection of whom they communicated with and the frequency of these communications (Bernard et al., 1979), as well as questioned the reliability of social network data collected based on respondents’ recall (Bernard & Killworth, 1977; Killworth & Bernard, 1976).