Browsing by Author "Niskala, Eveliina"

Objectives. School is an important context for adolescents’ growth and development, but quite little is known about their mutual social relations prevailing in school. In this paper, I tried to answer to this need by examining the relations between lower secondary school students from the perspectives of hanging out, school help and socio-digital participation. I investigate the structures of the networks, as well as, how the networks of genders differ from another and how different patterns of using technology are related to the networks. Moreover, I examine the networks of active and passive school helpers and the differences between schools. Methods. The data were collected from 7th graders (N = 192) from three lower secondary schools in Helsinki and concerned grade-level networks within school. The data were collected with a social network questionnaire and a questionnaire about socio-digital participation and digital skills. The methods included social network analysis (SNA) and statistical methods. With SNA I examined the structures of the networks and with statistical methods I classified participants according to level of school help and patterns of socio-digital participation and examine between group differences with t-test and ANOVA. Results and implications. The results showed that students had seven friends on average, and the hanging out networks were the biggest and densest of the examined networks. There were not gender differences regarding number of friends, but females had denser hangout networks than males. On average, school help was shared among six students. Providing help was common in general, and only few people did not take part in school help networks. Females sought and provided help more actively than males and had denser school help related networks. The closer analysis of school help groups showed that active school helpers (n = 74) had generally larger networks than passive school helpers (n = 118). On average, students took part in technology mediated activity with five students. There was no gender difference in the sizes of the networks of socio-digital participation, but again females had denser networks than males. There were differences between basic users (n = 102), gamers (n = 66) and creative participators (n = 20) mostly only in digital skills and help seeking so that creative participators had higher skills and they were especially active to seek help in their schoolwork. The visualizations of the networks, in turn, revealed that students’ networks were quite homophilic in terms of gender and student’s class. Overall, the study indicated that many adolescents have large networks in school and helping each other in schoolwork is common, but there are also big individual differences regarding within-school networks.