Abstract:

Adolescent groups and societies ­ whether short term classroom friendships or long-term close friendships ­ all tend toward clustering, hierarchy and homophilic association. However, certain organizational features and population compositions of classroom and schools can moderate these general tendencies, thereby making some groups and societies more egalitarian and less segregated and others a caste system of have¹s and have-nots. This argument is developed using longitudinal friendship data on large samples of classroom networks (Classroom study) and school networks (Add Health study); extensions of exponential random graph models to panels of social network information; and multi-level network analyses through meta-analysis techniques of hierarchical linear modeling.