Romania Changemakers Map 2022

Network characteristics

The network of social innovators in 2022 is composed of 779 people (nodes) and 1013 connections between them (edges). This translates to an average of 2.6 links per node. On average, each individual was nominated by 1.3 other innovators and made 4.33 nominations in turn.

Methodology

For carrying out the study we’ve used snowball sampling as our research method. We started from an initial number of 52 commencement nodes (46 of which were responsive) - people recommended by ASHOKA Romania, aiming for a balanced distribution by fields of activity, gender and geographical regions. Their characteristics were as it follows: 52% women, 44% men and 4% agender nodes, 13% distributed in the socio-economic development field, 29% in education, 19% in civic involvement, 15% in social inclusion, 4% environment, 4% health and 17% transversal. Regions wise, 14% were from Banat-Crisana-Maramures, 18% Bucharest-Ilfov, 4% Dobrogea, 16% Moldova, 8% Oltenia, 20% Transilvania and 6% from abroad.

Data collection was carried out in two stages. The first aimed at conducting 305 telephone interviews with the help of 7 operators, between July and September 2022. Following this stage, 299 entries were approved. In the second stage, the latter ones nominated another wave of social innovators, resulting in a further 474 unique entries. They were contacted by email to give consent for their name to be published along with a simplified data set regarding gender, field of activity, experience, region and organization. 339 confirmations were thus added, finally reaching a total of 638 people confirmed on the map, the rest up to 779 being anonymized.

Unlike the network charted in 2017, the current one is smaller, both in terms of the number of nodes (929) and in terms of the number of total connections (1580) and the average number of connections between them (7.9).

The differences can be explained by the small changes in the methodology, but also by the implementation of the GDPR agreement which involves an extra step to confirm the data registration. This was particularly noticeable in the case of people who were contacted by email, where we obtained a percentage of 75% confirmations. Also, 40 (13%) of those interviewed did not make any nomination.