Social Structure of Facebook Networks

TL;DR

This study analyzes Facebook friendship networks across 100 US colleges, examining how user attributes influence social structure through community detection and attribute-based comparisons.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of how individual attributes shape social communities in university Facebook networks, highlighting differences across institutions.

Findings

Common high school influences large institutions' networks

Importance of shared major varies by institution

Microscopic and macroscopic analyses offer complementary insights

Abstract

We study the social structure of Facebook "friendship" networks at one hundred American colleges and universities at a single point in time, and we examine the roles of user attributes - gender, class year, major, high school, and residence - at these institutions. We investigate the influence of common attributes at the dyad level in terms of assortativity coefficients and regression models. We then examine larger-scale groupings by detecting communities algorithmically and comparing them to network partitions based on the user characteristics. We thereby compare the relative importances of different characteristics at different institutions, finding for example that common high school is more important to the social organization of large institutions and that the importance of common major varies significantly between institutions. Our calculations illustrate how microscopic and macroscopic perspectives give complementary insights on the social organization at universities and suggest future studies to investigate such phenomena further.