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Friends with Academic Benefits

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1536504216662237

     In Janice McCabe’s paper “Friends with Academic Benefits,” she discusses a study of how college students’ friendship networks are related to various social and academic benefits, and how students from different backgrounds have distinctly different social networks. According to her paper, she categorized students’ friendship networks into three different types: tight-knitters, compartmentalizers, and samplers. These three different types of friendship networks each had a corresponding shape: a ball of yarn, a bow, or a daisy. As stated in the paper, the results showed that most students of color formed tight-knit social groups that cultivated a sense of belonging. Most students who were white or middle-class formed compartmentalized social groups, with clusters of academic and social peers separated. Lastly, samplers were composed of students of various backgrounds, but were mostly students that were academically successful despite their friends.

     Through the analysis of these various shapes and sizes of social networks, we can achieve many conclusions about the lives of students. Similar to how we pinpoint various characteristics of social networks in class, these skills were utilized to the examination of real life social networks of students. A more interesting study might be to categorize each edge in the social network of the students as a strong or weak tie, and investigate the effects of Triadic Closure, Local Bridges etc within a real life social network. What would it be like if we could analyze the social networks of the students, right here, at Cornell? Which group of friends would correspond to peers that interacted for “academic benefit,” and who would be part of what kinds of social circles? From these investigations, we might even learn more about ourselves and the people around us.

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