Overview: AMIDEAST is an NGO that is located in most countries in the Arab world as well as having headquarters in Washington DC. It is focused primarily on educational development issues for people in the Arab world, especially youth. I had the chance to work for AMIDEAST in Tunisia, and my proposal is designed to perform an Social Network Analysis (SNA) of the AMIDEAST organization.
Objective: This proposal is meant to map out the organizational network and information flows of AMIDEAST in order to learn important information about how people interact with each other, how communication differs from one office to another, and what the key challenges are to improved interconnection and information flows, and what solutions may exist to solve problems identified in the SNA.
Hypotheses: I would imagine that we might see cliques forming between American employees and Arab, local nationals in various AMIDEAST offices. I would also imagine that some offices may have higher degrees of centrality and closeness than others. The issue of how leadership interacts with the rest of the organization would also be interesting to find out. We may also see generational differences with younger employees forming factions or cliques that are apart from older employees.
Method: To use a survey to collect necessary data. After data is collected and mapped through SNA, we could compile data on the average Closeness and Density of each office to compare. We could also look at factions within office to find out who they are and why they are factionalized. We would then look at information flows in the organization to see how people are connected to each other and what gaps and weaknesses may exist in the organizational structure. We could also analyze inviduals to look at Eigenvector and Betweenness scores of people in the network to identify individuals who may be able to act as bridges or leaders for certain objectives and initiatives. We can also look at the attributes and see how people's gender, nationality, age, and other things affect the way they communication and interact with others in the organization.
Survey: Survey questions will capture data on A) the nature of relationships between employees and B) attribute data on employees.
Part A Questions (nature of relationships):
The following questions would require people to answer the question for each other employee in AMIDEAST. If doing so for the whole organization worldwide is too much work, employees could just answer these questions for people in their own office or country.
1 comment:
I like this. It's well-conceived and could make a significant contribution to the organization's understanding of how it functions. You have three network questions, which might be one or two too many depending on the size of the population you're surveying. Otherwise, it looks good. I hope you will be able to do this for and with them.
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