Calculation of Sociometric Indicators

Tables

• The Reciprocity table shows who chose who in the group and how many times.
• The Mutual Relationships table shows the reciprocal relationships of children who choose each other.
• Under the Frequency table, you can see how many choices each child received for certain questions.
• The Summary table shows how many outgoing and incoming choices and how many reciprocal relationships a given child has, along with how many nominations he/she received in each category.
• The Graph shows a visual representation of the responses received by category. If you want to see fewer than four categories, click on the indicator you don't want to see and the program will remove the unwanted indicator from the graph. You can do this with multiple indicators, for example if you only want to see the results of one category at a time.

Sociogram

The program also creates the frame of the sociogram. The thickness of the lines indicates the strength of the relationships, with red dots representing girls and blue dots representing boys. The dots can be dragged to the desired location by using the mouse. If you want to start over, click on the redraw button, if you want to save your work, click the pin button (so that when you return later the program will not reorder the dots back to the original circle but will save your ordering), and if you want to download your work, click the download button. 

IMPORTANT! The pin button is temporarily out of order. If you would like to save your work, draw the sociogram and click on the Download button to save it to your computer.

Calculated Indicators

• Mutuality index
  Number of participants with contacts / Total number of participants
  Percentage of respondents with a mutual relationship

• Density index
  Number of reciprocal relationships / Number of participants
  Ratio of reciprocal contacts to the number of respondents - it shows the average number of contacts per respondent

• Cohesion index
  Number of mutual contacts / ( number of participants * ( number of participants - 1 ) ) / 2
  Indicates the percentage of realised relationships out of all possible contacts in the social environment

• Indicator of reciprocal relationships
  Number of reciprocal contacts / Number of declared contacts
  Indicates the percentage of respondents' choices that were reciprocal

• Group climate indicator
  dispersion of sympathy choices : dispersion of function choices

• Significance index
  Number of secondarily and primarily significant participants / number of participants

• Role index
  Number of participants with a role / number of participants (function, popularity and ability are shown separately as well)

Avarage ranges

The values below are the standards used in the 2021 survey on eSzocMet data, the adjoining short user guide is available on the link below: Guide to sociometric standards.

The following table from the research of Ferenc Gebauer (2008) can also be used to interpret the indicators and to place the class’ averages. A detailed description of the indicators can be found in the work of Ferenc Mérei: Hidden Network of Communities.