Effects of Homophily on Academic Performance

Abstract

Social networking is one of the most important fields of sociology and with emergence of social networking sites such as Facebook; Twitter etc. importance of this field is even more. The possible sociological force behind formation of social networks is ‗homophily‘, which means that people tend to form friendships links with people who are similar to them (social selection) or people modify their behavior in order to conform to the behavior of their friends (social influence). Homophily is an artifact of these two social phenomena. In field of educational psychology ―Homophily‖ is considered as the major cause of community formation in a class. For analysis of student‘s behavior, it is important to study the effects of ―Homophily‖. In this research, online data of a class from social networking site ―Facebook‖ is collected by developing a Facebook application. By analyzing data using social networks analysis techniques student‘s communities are found. Interaction levels and friendship strengths are studied on the basis of pokes, messages, wall posts and comments. Then student‘s results are compared with their friends and peers and all those who are involved in community formation. As it is comparatively easier to visualize a complex structure of human behavior in social networks through socio-gram hence all results are visualized through different graphs. Different techniques are used for social network data analysis and then data is co-related with student‘s grades. Results showed homophily in class on the basis of gerund, as 89.47% female students have friendship with females and 86.63% male students are friends with male. Similarly, students belonging to well-off regions have more interactions with each other. Interactive patterns also showed an interesting result about student relationship i.e. student‘s belong to same cluster or group have similar grades and their belonging regions have similar literacy rates.