The Importance Of Sociocentric Networks

Superior Essays
To explore the social structure of policy implementation, we drew on data from a large study of social networks among professional development providers in the San Francisco Bay Area in the wake of the adoption of the Common Core state standards in math standards (CCSS-M) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The San Francisco Bay Area was chosen for two reasons. First, California had adopted and begun implementation of the CCSS-M and the NGSS. Second, prior research has suggested the importance of inter-organizational collaboration within geographic regions for knowledge-intensive work {Powell:1996wa, OwenSmith:2004ck, Powell:2005fo}. Organizations in a region form an ecosystem in which ideas and information are shared. Since professional development involves multiple organizations, often geographical proximate, a region-focused study made the most sense. We defined the SF Bay Area to include four counties: Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara.
The study collected data on the advice and collaboration sociocentric networks of professional development providers in mathematics and science. Sociocentric networks, in contrast to egocentric networks, focus on the social structure of a particular social setting, rather than the social structure of individuals’ social lives (CITE). For this
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Therefore, we used a snowball sampling design, which is appropriate when investigating sociocentric networks without clear social boundaries (CITE). The snowball process begins with “seeds”, the initial sample from which the larger sample is built. The seeds are used to generate new participants for the sample. The new participants then generate further participants for the sample. This continues until the sample is saturated—that is, there are no new participants to included. The details for the sample in this study

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