Data from: Exploring formation processes in political discussion networks (Q6691255)

Our data comprises thirty personal networks that belong to people affiliated to a local branch of a newly created and rising star Romanian parliamentary political party. At the moment of the data collection process (February, 2019), the political organization was only four-month old. The study participants were randomly selected from a roster of 645 members (the total tally of people affiliated to a local branch situated in a large Romanian urban area). We used a stratified sampling, with three strata based on age: 18 25 years-old (group A, young), 26 55 years-old (group B, adult), and more than 56 years old (group C, senior). In each stratum, we performed simple random sampling and selected ten respondents. The interviews were administered by phone (computer-assisted telephone interviewing). A participant was eligible to the study if formally affiliated to the local political branch of interest. The identity of each study participant was anonymized to ensure privacy protection. Within the study population, the minimum age was 19 and the maximum, 72. The three clusters (groups A, B, and C) were useful for controlling the age of the interviewees while fitting the statistical models. Stratified sampling was also deployed to avoid any potential sources of bias (e.g., over-representation of some age categories given the skewed distribution of the study population). Given the affiliation to the same political organization, the study participants were deemed equivalent at least on this dimension. For each of the thirty study participants (egos), we collected data about sex (female or male), age and education (with or without higher education studies). We elicited the alters of each ego using the following name generator: Please, mention five people with whom you discuss most often political issues. We applied alter interpreters (questions about alters) referring to sex (female or male), age, and education (with or without higher education studies). Also, we collected information about the alter-alter ties to build the personal networks. We administereda simple question and asked each respondent whether the alters knew each other (Would you say that alter X and alter Y know each other?). Given the form of the question, we elicited undirected alter-alter ties. We profiled the people with whom egos declared to discuss most often political topics. Namely, we measured: a) the perceived level of political agreement between ego and each of the alters (rated from 1minimum, to 5maximum), b) whether ego and alters share membership to the same political party, c) the perceived emotional closeness between each pair of alters and between ego and alters each ego was asked to rate the emotional closeness from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum), d) the status of the alters family or non-family (friends or acquaintances), and e) the ego alter personal history - the estimated duration in years of each ego-alter tie.