A Note on Inferences Regarding Network Subgroups: Response to Burt and Bittner.

The article presents response by the authors to the critical comments made by sociologists R.S. Burt and William M. Bittner on the works of the authors. First, Burt and Bittner questioned the scope of the authors' article. They argue that one cannot extend the scope of the conclusions from one network analysis to other systems. In authors' view, this misses the point entirely. In the series of papers written on informant accuracy the authors have never drawn conclusions about the structure of any group studied, let alone extended any conclusions about social structure to other groups or to the world at large. What authors have been studying is not groups, but the methods by which most researchers have gathered data about groups. It is about these methods that authors have drawn a global generalization from their seven data sets: the method by which data are traditionally obtained (some variant of "who do you interact with") does not yield any reliable information whatsoever about who people in the group actually interact with.