This study assesses whether Facebook users have different ‘connection strategies,’ a term which describes a suite of Facebook-related relational communication activities, and explores the relationship between these connection strategies and social capital. Survey data (N = 450) from a random sample of undergraduate students reveal that only social information-seeking behaviors contribute to perceptions of social capital; connection strategies that focus on strangers or close friends do not. We also find that reporting more ‘actual’ friends on the site is predictive of social capital, but only to a point. We believe the explanation for these findings may be that the identity information in Facebook serves as a social lubricant, encouraging individuals to convert latent to weak ties and enabling them to broadcast requests for support or information.

/pdf/connection-strategies-social-capital-implications-of-3l2ng3vh3i.pdf

Connection Strategies: Social Capital Implications of Facebook-enabled Communication Practices

http://www.columbia.edu/~aw2951/SocialNetworks.pdf

Tastes, ties, and time: A new social network dataset using Facebook.com

This chapter summarizes the recent literature on peer effects in student outcomes at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels. Linear-in-means models find modest sized and statistically significant peer effects in test scores. But the linear-in-means model masks considerable heterogeneity in the effects experienced by different types of students. Using nonlinear models, one prevalent finding is larger peer effects in which high ability students benefit from the presence of other high ability students. Studies that stratify students by race and ability often find that students are affected both by the racial composition of their peers and by the achievement of their same-race peers. At the university level, several studies find modest sized effects from dormmate and roommate background on own academic performance. For both university and high school students, the measured peer effects on “social” outcomes such as drinking are larger than the effects on academic outcomes. Many authors find substantial peer effects in drinking, drug use, and criminal behavior. This chapter suggest areas for future investigation and data collection.

Peer Effects in Education: How Might They Work, How Big Are They and How Much Do We Know Thus Far?

We study the social structure of Facebook “friendship” networks at one hundred American colleges and universities at a single point in time, and we examine the roles of user attributes–gender, class year, major, high school, and residence–at these institutions. We investigate the influence of common attributes at the dyad level in terms of assortativity coefficients and regression models. We then examine larger-scale groupings by detecting communities algorithmically and comparing them to network partitions based on user characteristics. We thereby examine the relative importance of different characteristics at different institutions, finding for example that common high school is more important to the social organization of large institutions and that the importance of common major varies significantly between institutions. Our calculations illustrate how microscopic and macroscopic perspectives give complementary insights on the social organization at universities and suggest future studies to investigate such phenomena further.

/pdf/social-structure-of-facebook-networks-2tbjush8y0.pdf

Social structure of Facebook networks

Parents with higher education levels have children with higher education levels. However, is this because parental education actually changes the outcomes of children, suggesting an important spillover of education policies, or is it merely that more able individuals who have higher education also have more able children? This paper proposes to answer this question with a unique dataset from Norway. Using the reform of the education system that was implemented in different municipalities at different times in the 1960s as an instrument for parental education, we find little evidence of a causal relationship between parents' education and children's education, despite significant OLS relationships. We find 2SLS estimates that are consistently lower than the OLS estimates, with the only statistically significant effect being a positive relationship between mother's education and son's education. These findings suggest that the high correlations between parents' and children's education are due primarily to family characteristics and inherited ability and not education spillovers.

/pdf/why-the-apple-doesn-t-fall-far-understanding-2jh6f7vsz4.pdf

Why the apple doesn’t fall far : understanding intergenerational transmission of human capital

The old boy (and girl) network: Social network formation on university campuses

This paper describes how economists study social networks. While economists borrow from other fields like sociology or computer science, their approach of modeling of social networks is distinguished by the emphasis on the role of choices under constraints. Economists investigate how socioeconomic background and economic incentives affect the structure and composition of social networks. The characteristics of social networks are important for economic outcomes like the matching of workers to jobs and educational attainment. I review the theoretical and empirical literature that investigates these relationships and discuss possible implications of new, Internet based, forms of social interactions.

Online social networks in economics

Do more diverse environments increase the diversity of subsequent interaction? Evidence from random dorm assignment

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16738/w16738.pdf

A simple test for private information in insurance markets with heterogeneous insurance demand

This paper documents the structure and composition of social networks on university campuses and investigates the processes that lead to their formation. Using administrative data and information from Facebook.com, we document the factors that are the strongest predictors of whether two students are friends. Race is strongly related to social ties, even after controlling for a variety of measures of socioeconomic background, ability, and college activities. We develop a model of the formation of social networks that decomposes the formation of social links into effects based upon the exogenous school environment and effects of endogenous choice arising from preferences for certain characteristics in one's friends. We use student-level data from an actual social network to calibrate the model. We simulate the social network under alternative university policies aimed at reducing social segmentation. We find that changes in the school environment that affect the likelihood that two students interact have only a limited potential to reduce the racial segmentation of the social network.

Adalbert Mayer

Papers

The old boy (and girl) network: Social network formation on university campuses

Online social networks in economics

Do more diverse environments increase the diversity of subsequent interaction? Evidence from random dorm assignment

A simple test for private information in insurance markets with heterogeneous insurance demand

The Old Boy (and Girl) Network: Social Network Formation on University Campuses