Given the nature of my data (Forbes top companies), I think it would be appropriate to look at specific countries as the Ego and the job categories as the alters. Am I correct in assuming that the local pattern of relations would be how my selected county (the ego) is connected to other countries through job category?

Since I am working with countries and job categories, I think it would be best for me to work with non directional neighborhoods. I would like to see some directed ego centric data though.

In my project, I will define the ego neighborhood in this straightforward way--ego and alter are linked if they were co-authors on a published paper. I would like to explore the ego-centric network of a few top productive authors, to analyse their collaboration patterns. Specifically, do these top productive authors tend to have cross-disciplinary partnerships, inter-institutional partnerships, or with-in institutional partnerships?

A few could apply. Honestly I might need to do a lot of playing with my data to see how/if ego-centric networks will actually give me any meaningful measures. I'm interested in some of the brokerage concepts which is making me rethink a lot of what I've done so far.

Egocentric networks could be applied to my assignment in various ways. One of the more interesting ones would be to compare similarly titled jobs (i.e. Instructional Designer) within different organizations (OIT v. College level) and/or to compare similarly connected individuals and determine their titles and positions to see if there are any takeaway commonalities.

I could use ego-centric network analysis in my research by taking each individual ego and exploring the friendships between the each individual ego in relation to the network. Working with 2 smaller groups of 4 participants, I have already considered doing this, but this chapter has given me more ideas on how to incorporate this type of SNA. I would also like to explore the connection between egos coupled with any ties between alters.

Since I am looking at teacher interactions across four groups in two years, I could use ego-centric networks to explore the role of particular actors -- to answer questions related to how particular actors influence interactions based on specific aspects of certain attributes - by looking at the quality/quantity of their initiated interactions for example. Another example is to look at the moderator's role -- each year there was a different but consistent moderator leading all four groups. Categorizing the moderator's interactions based on either quality or quantity could also be very revealing?