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. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All
rights reserved.
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