Strength of Friendships in Academic Settings
The strength of relationships has been studied through many different lenses for decades. From the rise of gender dysphoria in female friend groups or so-called suicide contagion, it is evident that connections made in life significantly affect individual experiences.
Less discussed is how different friendships in life can affect academic performance and social life. According to a 2016 journal article from Janice McCabe titled “Friends with Academic Benefits,” McCabe concludes that there are three general types of friendships: tight-knitters, samplers, and compartmentalizers.
Tight-knitters can be compared to a ball of yarn. They consider themselves family and support each other socially. But, members can pull other members down if they do not share similar motivation or study habits. Compartmentalizers look more like a bowtie. Students with compartmentalized friend groups often have groups for different reasons: social, academic, and identity support. Finally, samplers have one-on-one friendships from different places, making their network look like a daisy. They do not have to rely on their friendships for academic support.
Interestingly enough, there was often a racial divide in such friendships. People of color, specifically Black and Latinx people, often found themselves in tight-knit friend groups. In addition, most compartmentalizers were white and middle-class. They supported each other socially and academically, but compartmentalizers of color often had compartmentalized friend groups that supported each other more specifically with identity issues.
As this study is analyzing friendships, we can call every relationship strong. But perhaps the number of strong ties in a group can affect the emotional strength of a friend group. As tight-knit friend groups have more strong ties in between themselves, perhaps it could be fair to call such friend groups “emotionally stronger” than other friend groups. Regarding the compartmentalizers, strong ties are more sparse and spread out in a larger number of groups, and regarding samplers, strong ties are found one-on-one and not shared between multiple people. Therefore, perhaps we could hypothesize that these groups are less “emotionally strong” and less likely to stay friends as there are fewer shared strong ties.
There may be data to back this hypothesis up. According to the article, tight-knitters kept almost 1/3 of their friendships, while compartmentalizers and samplers kept almost 1/4 of their friendships after college.
Even if this study on types of friend groups is fascinating, it is important to note that the data from this study is not fully diverse, as it was taken from predominantly white midwestern universities. It is reasonable to expect the data to be slightly different in universities with different racial or cultural demographics.
Acknowledgments: https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2016/10/dartmouth-study-examines-how-friendship-networks-college-impact-students-academic-and
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1536504216662237