The transition to university provides first-year students the opportunity to forge new friendships from what is oftentimes a diverse pool of peers. Nonetheless, the friendships that develop are disproportionately within-group, versus cross-group, across a variety of dimensions. Explanations for such homophily include ingroup preferences, though within the constraints provided by the composition of the population, including consolidation, biased opportunities for meeting (e.g., foci), and amplification through network mechanisms. Prior efforts to understand the relative strength of homophily-inducing mechanisms often consider the combined effect of preferences and opportunities. We offer greater clarity to the origins of within and cross-group ties by isolating the opportunities for each type of tie available through various network selection micro-mechanisms. Our method allows us to compare how much foci, consolidation, and network mechanisms funnel students into within-group opportunities or, in limited cases, increase exposure to outgroup peers. We illustrate our method using longitudinal network data from 1,800 students in two consecutive first-year cohorts of a STEM major. We discuss the implications of our results for efforts to understand and promote intergroup relations on campus and the generalization of our method to investigate differential opportunities for any definition of tie types via network micro-mechanisms.

We examined to which extent adolescents perceive gender and ethnic homophily in peers’ friendships in their classroom. While social network research consistently finds that friendships form more often between similar individuals, leading to gender and ethnic network segregation, it remains unclear to what extent people also perceive homophily when they infer the friendships around them. However, as perceptions shape various behaviours and attitudes, overestimating others’ homophily could limit adolescents’ willingness to form intergroup friendships. In this paper, we first examined to what extent perceived segregation aligned with actual network segregation. Then, we explored factors that could explain perceptions of peers’ friendships. Since segregation results from homophily and relational mechanisms, we investigated to what extent perceptions can be explained by relational mechanisms (e.g., balance) and attributes (e.g., gender, ethnicity) of the actors and the targets. We expected that friends and similar actors (e.g., males) would have more similar perceptions of the friendships in their class. Additionally, we examined perceived homophily by testing whether similar dyads (e.g., ethnic minority members) were more often perceived as friends. We applied a novel statistical method, which was introduced by Koskinen and colleagues (2023), using multilevel exponential random graph models in MPNet to model the two-layer network: self-reported friendships and the perceived friendship network (i.e., cognitive social structure). Our study advances the field by examining perceived homophily in adolescents’ perceptions of peers’ friendship relations, while accounting for relational mechanisms and attributes that could explain these perceptions.

Input, output, and interaction have been considered central to the process of second language (L2) acquisition. This contribution analyses the longitudinal development of the social interaction network and its influence on L2 gains of a complete cohort of 41 U.S. sojourners enrolled in a 3-month intensive study-abroad Arabic program. Unlike extant research, the current study i) focuses on students’ in-the-wild interactions with their alma mater classmates as well as other agents, ii) reconstructing a complete network of the former, iii) traces the impact of each individual student’s position in the social graph using established centrality metrics, and iv) includes a dynamic developmental perspective with three measurement points at 4-week intervals each, gauging the extent to which changes in the network configuration translate to changes in both self-perceived and objectively measured progress along a range of dimensions.

Objective proficiency gains were negatively influenced by predeparture proficiency (negatively), multilingualism, perceived integration of the peer learner group (negatively), and the number of fellow learners speaking to the student. Analyses reveal relative stable same-gender cliques, but with changes in the patterns and strength of interaction. We also discuss interesting divergent trajectories of centrality metrics, L2 use, and progress, predictors of self-perceived progress across skills, and the interplay of context and gender.

In a growing diverse society, young people are confronted with concerns for critically understanding dehumanizing social conditions of marginalized groups in society. The term critical consciousness (CC)—grounded in critical pedagogy (Freire, 2000)—deals with awareness, motivation, and agency of oppressive systemic forces in society against marginalized groups. In the foreground is the way young people come to learn about and read the social world. Limited work suggest peer socialization (Heberle et al. 2020), through discussion of social issues and support of critical perspectives on issues of injustice. Yet, measures of socialization and CC are fragmented and inconsistent, rendering mixed findings. Moreover, the source of CC socialization remains unclear: Are young people influenced by all peers equally?

Recent data was used from 742 freshman residing in four learning communities at a large, public university in the American Midwest (two cohorts; two waves yearly). Students reported on three dimensions of CC (validated ShoCCS; Diemer et al. 2022), three items each (reflection, motivation, action; αs = 0.77). Students also reported about their networks listing the names of up to ten peers with whom they “hang out” in their community.

The preliminary findings from a SAOM (RSiena; Snijders et al. 2010), in which the average similarity effect (capturing socialization) was split into two (intra-ethnic relationships and inter-ethnic relationships), reveals that CC reflection and action are influenced in inter-ethnic relationships rather than intra-ethnic relationships. This study illustrates that diverse (inter-ethnic) peer networks function as socialization agents for the development of CC in young people.

Linguistic behavior is a key marker of identity, enabling individuals to position themselves within social spaces. One primary way people use language to signal social belonging or exclusion is through convergence or divergence. Aligning one’s linguistic behavior with that of an interlocutor signals social proximity and affiliation, whereas linguistic divergence indicates that the other is perceived as a member of an out-group. Despite the inherently relational nature of this process, empirical evidence utilizing social network analysis (SNA) remains limited. This study seeks to uncover how social structures influence accommodative behaviors, employing SNA for the first time in this context.

We examine the adverbial practices of twenty-five young adult speakers across seventy-five interactions with members of their personal networks. Using Generalized Estimating Equation (GEE) models, our findings reveal that accommodation is influenced by two structural levels: the overall social network structure and the integration of alters within it. At the network level, higher clustering and increased homophily are linked to greater linguistic convergence. At the dyadic level, when an alter is central within the emotional support network, ego exhibits a stronger tendency to converge linguistically. Additionally, our results suggest that the structural effects interact with the composition of the personal network.

These results underscore the combined impact of network structure and composition in shaping linguistic behaviors, offering new insights into how social connections reinforce norms and drive linguistic variation.