When I visualize the sociogram, only the alters show up with edges between them but there isn’t a node for the ego. Is there a feature to include the ego at the center? Or is that not the idea for viewing the sociogram?
Hi @Alison
No, there is no node representing ego in our network model. Since ego is the participant it is assumed that the sociogram is seen from the ego’s perspective (that is, the relationships between alters, independently of them). Ego is assumed to have an edge to all alters named by virtue of having named them.
We understand other perspectives on this, though. There are a couple of workarounds:
- If you just want a visual frame of reference for the positioning of nodes, you could consider creating a custom background image with “you” in the center. This obviously won’t allow edges to be created, but it may work for your needs.
- If you need to be able to create edges of different types between ego and other alters, you’ll have to add an additional name generator where you create an ego node. To make sure that this ego node is excluded from alter only screens, it would be a good idea to use the “additional variables” feature to set a variable such as “is_ego” to true. You can then have the participant place this node at the center of the sociogram, and do the edge creation as you prefer. This isn’t our intended workflow, and it will introduce other complexity (such as potentially needing to filter this ego node out of other screens), but it may give you what you want.
Hope this helps!
Thank you @Joshua very helpful to understand the intuition and other options. Thank you!
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