The role of prosocial attitudes and academic achievement in peer networks in higher education

Abstract

After the transition to university, students need to build a new peer network, which helps them to adapt to university life. This study investigated to what extent students’ prosocial attitudes and academic achievement facilitate the embeddedness in friendship and help-seeking networks, while taking structural network characteristics into account. Participants were 95 first-year bachelor’s degree students and were part of learning communities consisting of 12 students at a university in the Netherlands. Measures included student-reports of prosocial attitudes, peer nominations of friendship and help-seeking networks, and officially registered grades (GPA). Longitudinal social network analysis, stochastic actor-based modeling with the package RSiena, revealed that both students’ own prosocial attitudes and achievement played a role in their friendship formation, whereas only students’ own achievement made the formation of their help-seeking relationships more likely. When students were friends, it was more likely that they approached each other for help and vice versa. Similarity in achievement level contributed to relationship formation in friendship and help-seeking networks. Overall, the results underscore the importance of both student’ prosocial attitudes and achievement for their social adjustment (i.e., making friends) and only achievement for their academic adjustment (i.e., seeking help) during the first year of university within the context of small-scale teaching.

Cohort-Based Education and Other Factors Related to Student Peer Relationships: A Mixed Methods Social Network Analysis

“…We did not find that students with higher levels of academic performance were more socially integrated as has been reported among undergraduates [35,[37][38][39] and MBA students [29]. This could be related to the emphasis on non-academic skills and knowledge (e.g., interpersonal communication, advocacy, human relationships) in social work training, making academic performance less important in selecting friends.…”

“…Strong evidence that graduate students tend to form relationships with similar peers comes from multivariate social network analyses of graduate student social networks. As in other human social networks [26], homophily based on gender, age, and grades is a consistent finding in student networks [27,29,30,37,38,48]. Qualitative studies emphasize the importance of students of color having relationships with similar peers [49,50].…”

“…Academic Achievement. Unlike gender and age, academic achievement has consistently been linked to increased social integration for students in higher education [35,[37][38][39]. Although most of the evidence is from studies with undergraduates, results of a study of 75 MBA students in Italy [29] suggest that academic performance may also be an important correlate of peer relationships for graduate students.…”

“…There have been limited inquiries into network structural effects in graduate student peer networks, but evidence exists for each of these effects. Reciprocity and transitivity have been positively associated with the likelihood of social ties between undergraduate and graduate students [27,29,30,37,38]. There is evidence that transitivity effects are amplified the more friends or acquaintances that students have in common [25,52] and that transitivity may be particularly important for students to connect if they do not have classes together [52].…”

“…This was supported in the quantitative analysis, which found significant homophily effects for friendship based on age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Homophily based on these demographic groupings is common in human relationships [26] and often found in student social networks [27,29,30,37,38,48,51]. Even though focus groups reported being drawn to people that were similar, they also discussed that the high level of peer interaction that occurred within their cohort gave them the opportunity to expand their relationships to include students they initially felt were different from them.…”