he shows that the closer the ties are for a respondent, the greater the political homogeneity the network has. Another example could be the work by Knoke (1990) which uses a very similar research design but is based on a national sample (the General Social Survey). He shows that both the extent to which respondents' environments are politicized and the frequency of political discussions they have influence their party choices. These studies may be done in either a cross-sectional design at one time point or in a panel design through the repeated measurement of the same individuals. Secondly and thirdly, the contextual analysis approach has come up with slightly different research designs. One way to incorporate information about respondents’ communities is to include aggregate level neighborhood characteristics in the individual level data. Another way to detect respondents’ communities is based on the snowball survey technique. Similarly to the research designs done by the Columbia Studies authors, respondents are asked about their closest friends. However, unlikely to those studies, in this case these friends are directly surveyed as well – thus not only the perception of their opinion is gathered. References Voting theory