The Different Types of Friendship Networks and How They May Affect Your Success
College students spend a lot of time with their friends. According to one estimate, the average college student spends just 15 hours a week in class, but 86 hours a week with friends . But to what extent do we understand the role of friendship and its impact on students, both academically and in society?
This post was originally published in The Conversation .
In my recent book , College Communication: How Friendship Networks Matter for Academic and Social Success , I analyzed friendship networks. My research shows that students create friendship networks that affect them in different ways.
Friends can motivate and support students, but friends can also hinder their learning. It is important to understand the role of these networks of friends – not only the role of friends, but also their connection with each other.
How networks affect us
We all know how important social media can be in our lives – they can affect our health, happiness, wealth, emotions, and even weight. Indeed, as sociologists Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler describe in their recent book , Connectivity, social media plays a role in everything people “feel, think, and do.”
One important part of social media is connections. We can connect with people in a variety of ways, including family, friends, colleagues, or less intimate bonds.
For example, about four decades ago, sociologist Mark Granovetter showed the importance of “weak ties,” that is, connections with people we don’t even know very well, who are just acquaintances, in job search. His work was important because it showed that it is not only who on your network that matters, but also the type of communication.
So, we know that social media can be useful and that not all people get these benefits. Rather than focusing on the extensive connections between friends of friends of friends, such as Christakis and Fowler, I looked in more detail at fewer connections.
I focused on a person’s friends and connections between friends. In doing so, I found three types of networks, each with distinct advantages and potential costs.
College Network Mapping
I started studying college networks because I felt that friendship was one of the most overlooked and crucial aspects of student success. In 2004, I interviewed 82 students at MU, a pseudonym for a major public four-year university in the Midwest, about their friendship.
It was a diverse group of students – white, black, and Latin men and women of different backgrounds – who were involved in a number of campus organizations (including those who were not affiliated with any organization). Each of these students named between three and 60 friends.
I collected information about each friend and the connections between them, thus making a map of the friendship network.
I divided each student into one of three types of networks: cohesive, splitters, and samplers. As shown in the pictures, the knitter’s net is like a ball of yarn, the divider net is like a bow tie, and the sampler net is like a daisy.
So what are these networks and how do they work?
Cohesive network
Close-knit people have one close-knit friendship group where almost all of their friends know each other. One close-knit person I met was Alberto, a Hispanic, whose friendship group included friends from his hometown and new friends he made at MU. He called them “family.”
His friends helped him deal with some racist incidents on campus. Alberto spoke to his friends about these incidents, for example, discussing cases where professors and colleagues have made what Alberto called “derogatory” and “offensive” comments about Latin Americans.
In Alberto’s case, his close-knit group of friends provided both academic and social support: they studied together, provided emotional support to academics, and engaged in stimulating intellectual conversations.
However, not all cohesive networks provide the same support. Some can also distract students. For half of my close-knit friends, I found that friends were more of a distraction than a helping hand. For example, they distracted each other from work and study. As Latasha explained, she may have tried to study, but seeing a sleeping friend tires her, and instead she sleeps.
The behavior was most infectious in close-knit circles – both the academically rewarding behavior of Alberto’s friends and the distracting behavior of Latasha’s friends spread easily. I have found that cohesive networks can have the strongest impact on academic and social outcomes.
Cluster network
The second group, which I called “compartmentalizers,” had networks divided into two to four clusters, where friends knew each other within the clusters, but rarely between them.
For example, Mary, a middle-class white student, “divided” her friends into two groups: friends from home and friends from the University, who provided different types of support.
Mary felt social support from friends in her hometown, but friends in her sorority also provided some emotional support for the scientists. However, her main source of academic support was acquaintances, not friends, who met in class, shared notes, and questioned each other before exams. Unlike tight-knit people, who only had one group of friends providing multiple types of support, the dividers had multiple groups, each providing different types of support.
In general, the dividers came from more affluent segments of the population who found it easier to study on campus and do well in college with less support from friends than those who worked with other types of networks.
One of the challenges with this type of network was keeping up with every cluster. For example, Jim told me, “I’m afraid that if I don’t spend enough time with my friends, they will leave me.” He felt like he had already “lost contact” with his hometown friends, and he struggled to keep up with his schoolwork with two groups of friends from MU.
Individual friendship
A third networking category, “samplers,” brought friends one by one from different locations, such as campus organizations, classrooms, and workplaces, with the result that friends were less connected to each other.
While many close-knit individuals and section specialists made friends to help them excel academically and in society, samplers achieved academic success independently.
One of the samplers I met was Steve, a black working class man. Steve developed personal friendships at events, food courts, and elsewhere on campus. Like many students of color I interviewed, Steve described his isolation on campus on the basis of race.
However, like other samplers, Steve rarely discussed these experiences of isolation with friends and remained isolated. Steve also felt lonely in his academic pursuits. Although he had many friends and was involved on campus through a number of student organizations, Steve felt socially and academically lonely at MU.
Sampler friends did not distract them from their academic pursuits, although I wondered if they could have done better with their friends?
After college
What happens to these friendship networks when students leave college?
Five years later, I interviewed the same students again to find out what happened to them and their friendship circles after they dropped out of college. By the time I spoke with them, most of the participants had not been in college for one to four years and were between the ages of 23 and 27. I was curious how many friends remained during this five-year period and if the types of networks remained.
Friendship networks during college mattered in both of these aspects – whether specific friendships and types of contact persisted after college.
As for the types of networks, as a rule, dividers remained separators, and cohesive ones – cohesive ones. However, after college, only one sample remained as a sample, indicating a mismatch with MU, rather than some of the persistent personality traits or friendship preferences that differentiate the samples from other types of networks.
In parallel with these general trends, Alberto remained a close-knit knitter, Mary a compromise, and Steve a close-knit knitter. With close-knit bonds, Steve felt socially supported and was no longer lonely after college.
There was a lot of turnover among friends, and only about 25% remained friends during this five-year period. In other words, if someone named 20 friends in college, only five of them stayed in their postgraduate network.
Close-knit knitters have the most friends over that five-year period (30 percent stayed in their network, compared to 23 percent for splitters and samplers). The close-knit bonds created by the close-knit during college tended to result in fewer changes in their networks. Unsurprisingly, the tight ties were more likely to be the last.
So what does this mean?
Friends are important to students’ academic and social success. As the examples of Alberto, Mary, and Steve show, each type of network has both advantages and disadvantages during college and beyond.
Students need to be aware of their networks and how they help or hinder them.
For example, close-knit people need to be especially careful about whether friends are pushing them rather than pushing them away in school. Compartmentalizers must be mindful of the number of clusters in their network; they must consciously prioritize so that important friendships and scientists are not compromised. Samplers need to understand that friends can be valuable sources of help and they may be able to actively build a supportive community of friends.
Beyond that, students should also remember that not only their friends, but how their friends relate to each other also matters.