Browsing by Subject "Adolescents"

The purpose of this study was to examine high school students’ social networks from perspectives of friendship, helping others in school and social-digital participation as well as compare potential differencies in networks between girls and boys and between different profiles of socio-digital participation by using social network analysis. The subject of the study was first year students of a high school in Helsinki (N = 82). The data was collected by using a social networking questionnaire and a questionnaire for social-digital participation. According to the results students had 8 friends on average and everyone helped at least one peer with schoolwork. Instead, there was relatively low amount of connections between students in network of socio-digital participation which represents helping others with information and communication technology (ICT) as well as shared activity in internet. There were differences in networking between genders thus on average girls had more friends and school related helping relationships than boys who had more ICT related activity with other peers than girls. However, the results were distorted by the low number of boys (n = 21) in respect of girls (n = 49). Instead, students’ profiles of socio-digital participation did not have a clear influence on their networks. In fact, in this study the homophily of students’ personal networks came out mostly through gender in all described networks.