How are adolescent clique and crowd formations assessed?

What will be an ideal response?

Cliques are small groups of adolescents that have common concerns and interests. To
assess clique membership, researchers gather friendship data on as many adolescents as
possible. Researchers enter these nomination data into a computer and conduct a social
network analysis; this analysis identifies cliques, and particular adolescents that might
belong to more than one. Crowds, are essentially large groups of cliques. Crowds are
often identified though a similar nomination procedure, for example, adolescents may
be asked to identify other adolescents that belong to certain crowds. Next, the
adolescents could be asked to indicate which crowd they belong to as well. This strategy
provides converging evidence of crowd membership.