Social distancing and isolation have been widely introduced to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. Adverse social, psychological and economic consequences of a complete or near-complete lockdown demand the development of more moderate contact-reduction policies. Adopting a social network approach, we evaluate the effectiveness of three distancing strategies designed to keep the curve flat and aid compliance in a post-lockdown world. These are: limiting interaction to a few repeated contacts akin to forming social bubbles; seeking similarity across contacts; and strengthening communities via triadic strategies. We simulate stochastic infection curves incorporating core elements from infection models, ideal-type social network models and statistical relational event models. We demonstrate that a strategic social network-based reduction of contact strongly enhances the effectiveness of social distancing measures while keeping risks lower. We provide scientific evidence for effective social distancing that can be applied in public health messaging and that can mitigate negative consequences of social isolation.
SignificanceUnderstanding the factors that explain academic failure and success of university students is a core interest of educational researchers, teachers, and managers. We demonstrate how the dynamic social networks that informally evolve between students can affect their academic performance. We closely followed the emergence of multiple social networks within a cohort of 226 undergraduate university students. They were strangers to each other on their first day at university, but developed densely knit social networks through time. We show that functional studying relationships tended to evolve from informal friendship relations. In a critical examination period after one year, these networks proved to be crucial: Socially isolated students had significantly lower examination grades and were more likely to drop out of university.
Individuals' favorite subjects in school can predetermine their educational and occupational careers. If girls develop weaker preferences for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), it can contribute to macrolevel gender inequalities in income and status. Relying on large-scale panel data on adolescents from Sweden (218 classrooms, 4,998 students), we observe a widening gender gap in preferring STEM subjects within a year (girls, 19 to 15 percent; boys, 21 to 20 percent). By applying newly developed randomcoefficient multilevel stochastic actor-oriented models on social network data (27,428 friendships), we investigate how social context contributes to those changes. We find strong evidence that students adjust their preferences to those of their friends (friend influence). Moreover, girls tend to retain their STEM preferences when other girls in their classroom also like STEM (peer exposure). We conclude that these mechanisms amplify preexisting preferences and thereby contribute to the observed dramatic widening of the STEM gender gap.
Peers have long been found to be of relevance for educational aspirations and hence educational success. While sociological and social psychological theories often assume concrete social mechanisms that focus on "significant" peers, past research predominantly had to rely on classroom-level aggregates. This study examines how educational aspirations among adolescents cluster in friendship networks within school classes. Through the utilisation of social network measures from the CILS4EU data on Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden (15,203 individuals, 50% girls, MAGE 14.9 years), we construct two measures of the most significant peers around individuals, i.e. of the peer milieu, and explore the salience of educational aspirations in these milieus.Applying longitudinal logistic regression models and first-difference models with individual-level fixed effects, we find evidence for clustering of individuals with the same educational aspirations within classrooms, underlining the relevance of peers for educational success.
Ethnic minorities in Europe show diverging patterns of educational success, but in most national contexts, migrants and children of immigrants have lower achievements in terms of grades than their majority peers. This study asks whether social exclusion in the classroom can contribute to explaining this pattern. While limited access to social resources is often assumed to be of significance for educational success, it has rarely been measured explicitly. In this study, social exclusion is measured accurately and on a large, cross-national scale, by using social network data from 731 classrooms in England, Germany, and Sweden (CILS4EU data). Results show that social exclusion is negatively associated with school grades, but this does not contribute much to understanding grade differences between children of immigrant and children of majority background.
The discussion of the social, political and economic consequences of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic mainly revolves around negative effects. This study exploits a unique opportunity and analyses data from a survey (N = 13,316) that happened to be in the field in the months of the development and eventual manifestation of the COVID-19 pandemic. It documents slightly higher levels of average general life satisfaction as well as of satisfaction with various specific aspects of life (health, work, work-life balance and leisure) during the lockdown among scientists in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. It is argued that the lockdown can be regarded as a large-scale social experiment of a very sudden and abrupt change of work and social life, which is unique in history. Daily survey data elicited before and after the lockdown allows the construction of a quasi-experimental design for analysing how this abrupt change of social reality has affected satisfaction. For scientists, the lockdown mainly entailed the transition to work from home, leading to a reduced speed of life and allowing for more flexibility in incorporating family and leisure into the work day. It is discussed how some of these mechanisms might apply to the general population.
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