A network approach to studying effects of ethnic background on friendship and social groups

1. A network approach to studying effects of ethnic background on friendship and social groups Janna Fortuin Department of Education and Child Studies Leiden University, the Netherlands Aleš Žiberna Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ljubljana, Slovenia University of Ljubljana Faculty of Social Sciences

2. Outline • Theory • Research question • Data and sample • Analysis • Results so far • Conclusion • discussion

3. Social relations • Social relations: difference between friendship and social interaction within the classroom • Friendship research: focus on individuals • similarity-attraction hypothesis • Does this apply to both friendship and interaction networks?

4. Social network analysis • Focus on dyads, within context of network • Study both structural and actor-effects • Friendship: directed networks • Social interaction: undirected networks • Social relations from an educational practical application: integration

5. Research question • “To which degree are the friendship and interaction networks explained by objective and subjective ethnicity” • Controlling for structural effects, sociometric status, religion and activity involvement

6. Sample • 296 pupils in 14 sixth-grade classrooms, drawn from 14 multicultural elementary schools • Mean age= 11.4 (s.d. 0.63) • Class size 15-30 pupils

7. Questionnaire • Friendship measure: “name your three best friends” • Social interaction measure: “who hangs out with whom”-> transformed using NETWORKS 4.0 into one social composite map with an undirected network • Subjective ethnicity: “I am a…” • Objective ethnicity: country of birth of parents

8. Network examples green – boystriangles – subjective ethnicity is only Dutch red – girls circles – subjective ethnicity is not only Dutch

9. Preliminary data-analysis • Selection of 6 schools • Method: ERGM using SIENA • Missings were deleted • Some convergence problems

10. ERGM analysis • Dependent variable: social interaction or friendship network • Candidates for explanatory variables: • network variables (reciprocity, transitivity, degree distribution) • objective and subjective ethnicity • controlling variables (gender, age, participation in activities, religion and social status)

11. Models with Social Interaction Networks

12. Models with Friendship Networks

13. Results summarized • No consistent pattern • Social interaction networks: • in half of the schools, ethnicity plays a role • some activity involvement effects • one effect of being Muslim

14. Results continued • Friendship Networks: • ethnicity plays a role in 3 out of 5 schools • some activity involvement effects • Also some effects of having a popular or rejected sociometric status

15. Conclusions • Ethnicity plays a role in some classes, but it is not clear why this happens or doesn’t happen • A lot of variability in the type of ethnicity effect • Control variables are important in some classes, their inclusion sometimes diminishes the effect of ethnicity • Social interaction networks and friendship networks seem quite alike

16. Further analysis • All 14 schools, perhaps with deletion of schools with many missings • Multilevel analysis of results to detect any consistent pattern (obtaining convergence for the same model in all schools can be problematic) • All schools (with not too many missings) as one network • Explanation for presence or absence of ethnicity effect: multicultural make-up of the class? Other class-level constructs? Teacher effects?

17. Discussion • Please give us your feedback, to improve the next analysis and the paper!