Political and Social Discussion Network Survey Items Are Not Interchangeable

Experimentalists and survey researchers regularly measure the makeup and size of respondent personal discussion networks to learn about the social context in which citizens make political choices. When measuring these personal networks, some scholars use question prompts that specifically ask respondents about whom they discuss “politics” with, while others use more general prompts that ask respondents about whom they discuss “important matters” with. Prior research suggests that “political” discussion network prompts create self-reported networks that are substantively similar to “important matters” prompts. We conduct a nationally representative survey experiment to re-evaluate this question. Our results suggest that, although the size of networks generated by the two questions may be similar on average, the two questions generate different response distributions overall. In particular, respondents interested in politics report larger political discussion networks than general discussion networks, and respondents uninterested in politics report smaller political discussion networks than general discussion networks.