School-wide friendship metadata correlations

Abstract

Managers and education practitioners desire to know an extent to which sustainable school-wide friendship exists. Drawing on theory of network, this research focuses on bestfriendships that may contribute to positive school experience or school belonging in the context of school-wide interactions. We emphasize that school-wide unity is essential to refer to shared perceived friendship experience at the school level. The basic trust of this study is that managers should consider interconnectedness as a complex system of entangled interactions among students. We investigate best friendship network on the meso-to-macro scale. Particular attention is paid to the network phenomena of the largest component and network correlations for examining school-wide unity. The results show that abundance of asymmetric friendships leads to unity around school wide interactions. As suggested by network theory, popular students’ tendency to avoid forming closed clusters assures sustainability in school-wide friendships, and having same gender type or being classmates correlate highly with the choice of best friends, in contrast to achievement scores. Metadata correlations reveal same-gender and same-class clubs. Incorporating meso level findings into macro level indicates that some metadata (e.g. gender) may be considered as salient characteristics of the communities while other metadata (e.g. achievement scores) may be irrelevant. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd