Community structure and ethnic preferences in school friendship networks

Abstract

Recently developed concepts and techniques of analyzing complex systems provide new insight into the structure of social networks. Uncovering recurrent preferences and organizational principles in such networks is a key issue to characterize them. We investigate school friendship networks from the Add Health database. Applying threshold analysis, we find that the friendship networks do not form a single connected component through mutual strong nominations within a school, while under weaker conditions such interconnectedness is present. We extract the networks of overlapping communities at the schools (c-networks) and find that they are scale free and disassortative in contrast to the direct friendship networks, which have an exponential degree distribution and are assortative. Based on the network analysis we study the ethnic preferences in friendship selection. The clique percolation method we use reveals that when in minority, the students tend to build more densely interconnected groups of friends. We also find an asymmetry in the behavior of black minorities in a white majority as compared to that of white minorities in a black majority.

arXiv commentsubmitted to Physica A

References in corpus (22)

• Statistical mechanics of complex networks
• The structure and function of complex networks
• Community structure in social and biological networks
• Uncovering the overlapping community structure of complex networks in nature and society
• Evolution of networks
• Classes of behavior of small-world networks
• Specificity and stability in topology of protein networks
• Defining and identifying communities in networks
• Hierarchical Organization in Complex Networks
• Self-similarity of complex networks
• Intensity and coherence of motifs in weighted complex networks
• Detecting rich-club ordering in complex networks
• Weighted evolving networks: coupling topology and weights dynamics
• Detecting fuzzy community structures in complex networks with a Potts model
• Clique percolation in random networks
• Clustering and information in correlation based financial networks
• A network analysis of committees in the United States House of Representatives
• A system of mobile agents to model social networks
• Hierarchy Measures in Complex Networks
• Structural transitions in scale-free networks
• Preferential attachment of communities: the same principle, but a higher level
• Reciprocity and the Emergence of Power Laws in Social Networks

Cited by in corpus (34)

• Analyzing and Modeling Real-World Phenomena with Complex Networks: A Survey of Applications
• Social Structure of Facebook Networks
• Community landscapes: an integrative approach to determine overlapping network module hierarchy, identify key nodes and predict network dynamics
• Comparing Community Structure to Characteristics in Online Collegiate Social Networks
• Emergence of communities in weighted networks
• Assessing the relevance of node features for network structure
• Evaluating Local Community Methods in Networks
• Towards designing robust coupled networks
• Think Locally, Act Locally: The Detection of Small, Medium-Sized, and Large Communities in Large Networks
• Resilience of networks with community structure behaves as if under an external field
• Cascading Failures in Complex Networks
• ModuLand plug-in for Cytoscape: determination of hierarchical layers of overlapping network modules and community centrality
• The Naming Game in Social Networks: Community Formation and Consensus Engineering
• Disease-induced resource constraints can trigger explosive epidemics
• Bridgeness: A Local Index on Edge Significance in Maintaining Global Connectivity
• Detection of Core-Periphery Structure in Networks Using Spectral Methods and Geodesic Paths
• Density-based and transport-based core-periphery structures in networks
• Note on the equivalence of the label propagation method of community detection and a Potts model approach
• Community Structure in the United Nations General Assembly
• Complete trails of co-authorship network evolution
• Tactical Voting in Plurality Elections
• Social and Spatial Clustering of People at Humanity's Largest Gathering
• Dynamics and Processing in Finite Self-Similar Networks
• Synchronization over $Z_2$ and community detection in multiplex signed networks with constraints
• Confidence sets for network structure
• Quantifying the changing role of past publications
• Overlapping modularity at the critical point of k-clique percolation
• On the discovery of social roles in large scale social systems
• Vulnerability of Networks Against Critical Link Failures
• The art of community detection
• Optimization of robustness based on reinforced nodes in a modular network
• The Atlas for the Aspiring Network Scientist
• Detecting overlapping community structure: Estonian network of payments
• The norm game on a model network: a critical line