Browsing by Author "Terävä, Esa"

The aim of this study was to interpret and describe the social networks of ninthgraders on school in Helsinki and analyze the possible effect of gender, language, and school class to the structure of the networks. The research questions were as follows: 1. How the social networks of the ninthgraders were formed? 1.1 How uniform and dense were the groups in the network? 1.2. Were there any central pupils in the network and what were the values of centrality of pupils? 1.3. Were there any groups that communicated with some other language than Finnish? 1.4. What was the effect of gender for the network? 1.5. Did the school class of the pupils have effect on the network? 2. How did the pupils explain their choices of friends or the formation of the group? The hypothesis, based on teachers' descriptions, was that there were groups among the network that operated separately from each other. 41 ninthgraders of one particular school participated in the study. The data was gathered with a questionnaire 14.3.2014 and also by interviewing six pupils in May 2014. The social network analysis programme UCINET-6 was used to explore the ninthgraders' social networks and the interviews were analyzed by using qualitative content analysis. The results indicated that the pupils' social networks were divided in three separate groups and the network was neither united nor dense. Gender had a clear effect on the network. The pupils communicated mainly in Finnish. The school class of the pupils also had a significant effect on with whom the pupils spent time with at school. Pupils explained their choices of friends by same hobby, similarity, knowing each other for a long period of time, same school class, trusting one another, understanding one another and sense of humor. The same explanations were given related to the formation of the group, but also gender and the language of communication had an effect on it.