Interview of the principal participant regarding his egocentric network
Beyond analyzing the teacher community’s overall social network, we carried out an interview of the SE teacher, regarding his personal, i.e. egocentric, professional network. An egocentric network is one that emerges around a single actor (ego) and often extends beyond the immediate professional community (Marsden, 2005; Wasserman & Faust, 1994). The interview focused on two themes. The first theme includes the names of the professional experts who belonged to the principal participant’s network across the main school’s teacher community and external organizations. The second theme consists of the resources provided by the networking connections. The objective was not to examine the structure of the egocentric network, such as depth and strengths of network connections, but to analyze the existence and content of networking linkages. The interview produced 11 transcribed pages of data. The SE teacher’s egocentric network was also examined visually by paper-and-pencil technique (Hogan, Carrasco, & Wellman, 2007), and the visualization was reconstructed with a computer. A map-like picture was generated without proper names or the ego; it involved only the expert bodies (alters) to which the SE teacher was in a network relation.
