Leadership naturally emerges in group settings, with certain individuals driving goals, decision-making, and coordination. While research has advanced our understanding of leadership traits and interpersonal contexts, most studies focus on adults, and childhood leadership is primarily examined through self-reports in contemporary, industrialised societies. To expand current knowledge, we analyse leadership behaviours in children in a rural, historical setting. Using 1,677 written records of naturalistic observations from an ethnic Han village in Taiwan collected by Arthur P. Wolf between 1958–1960, we conducted behavioural analyses and extracted quantitative behavioural codings. We focus on the network structure of leadership behaviours and other theoretically-relevant `positive' (e.g., prosocial) and `negative' (e.g., aggressive) behaviours. For each of these behaviours, we construct 14 socio-centric networks that contain observed behaviours (N_behaviours=6,711) between all children (ages 0-12) in the village (N_individuals=214). We apply a multiplex generalisation of the social relations model, designed to estimate network structure, and the associations between networks, for unevenly sampled data. Our findings show that leadership behaviours are typically followed by group members, and that leaders decide who can join groups during play. Leaders exhibit a distinct behavioural profile: they are dominant, engage in teasing, scolding, and verbal aggression---challenging assumptions that leadership is solely rooted in prosocial behaviour. These rich analyses of rare, naturalistic observations of children's social life in a rural, non-Western, historical setting provide unique insights into the developmental nature of leadership, highlighting its complex interplay with social behaviours in early life.

Background: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are pervasive in resource-limited settings and exert consequences on mental health across the lifespan. Studies from rural Uganda have shown robust associations between ACEs and adult depression symptom severity, major depressive disorder, and suicidality. The ACEs “sum score”, however, obscures our understanding of the pathways linking ACEs and depression. The network approach to psychopathology provides a framework to disentangle the mechanisms driving associations between external risk factors and mental health symptoms.

Methods: We conducted a population-based social network survey of all adults in a rural parish in southwestern Uganda (91% response rate; N=1,566). ACEs were elicited with an adapted version of the Adverse Childhood Experiences-International Questionnaire. Current depressive symptoms were measured with the Hopkins Symptom Checklist for Depression. We used a culturally adapted name generator to identify network ties in five life domains. Using the Ising model, we estimated the co-symptomatology network of depressive symptoms and ACEs and identified the most salient nodes in the network.

Results: Of the nine ACEs, “sexual abuse” had the highest bridge strength, defined as the sum of the absolute value of all edges between a node and nodes outside its community (depressive symptoms). Exposure to family violence and neglect also had direct connections to current depressive symptoms.

Discussion: Findings highlight specific ACEs as key pathways to adult depressive symptoms, informing intervention targets in this resource-limited setting. Our next steps involve re-estimating the ACEs-depression co-symptomatology network stratifying by social network characteristics (e.g., isolates vs. non-isolates; high vs. low reciprocity).

Building positive peer relationships in adolescence is associated with many positive outcomes (e.g., academic achievement, physical activity). Physical education (PE) is considered to have a unique potential to promote peer relationships, although negative peer relationships and conflicts are often described, particularly between athletic and non-athletic students. Recent studies have confirmed the connection between high physical ability and peer relationships in PE using social network analysis, but no longitudinal studies have been conducted. To examine this, 292 students from 11 grade 5 classes were surveyed at three points during the school year. Students were asked to identify best friends, preferred team partners in PE, and high and low ability peers. The ability nominations were combined into a peer score for each student. Stochastic actor-oriented models were used to model the co-evolution of friendship, team partners and peer-perceived physical ability.

Initial results show that friendships are formed based on similarity, while team partners are chosen primarily on high performance. Also, boys are more likely to be chosen as team partners than girls. Additionally, the results show that team partners develop into friends and vice versa.

The results illustrate the differences in social integration in PE between athletic and non-athletic students and between boys and girls. Meanwhile, the positive development of team partners into friends shows the potential of PE to promote friendships in the classroom through PE. To improve the social inclusion of non-athletic students and girls, PE lessons could emphasize cooperation instead of competition to highlight other aspects of sport.

In a study of 72 introductory statistics students at a college in California, we measured the effect of several social factors on performance in the class. We hypothesized that students who are more afraid of math and statistics will do worse in the class, but also that the fear factor can be mitigated by becoming more integrated into the class. We also hypothesize that students who are more integrated in the class will perform better than those less integrated. Furthermore, we hypothesized that feelings of belonging will predict performance. Finally, we hypothesize that belongingness will be highly correlated with network characteristics, specifically in- and out-degree.

We administered pre- and post-semester surveys to two statistics classes at a western US college. Some 72 students completed validated measures of extroversion, belongingness, and fear of statistics. Sociometric network questions were included and allowed students to name up to 12 other students in class they knew by name with rosters pre-loaded and an autocomplete capacity.

We test whether becoming integrated into the class moderates the relationship between fear of statistics and course performance.

School classrooms are one of the primary contexts in which friendships between adolescents are shaped by homophily. However, whether adolescents rely on similarities in others’ characteristics when forming their perception of social networks remains unknown. This question might be especially relevant in ethnically diverse settings as these perceptions contribute to students' social isolation or exclusion. For instance, native Dutch adolescents might assume that their female classmates with an immigration background who wear hijabs primarily befriend each other and do not want to engage with non-Muslims. Such perceptions might reduce the prospects of future interactions. To understand how network perceptions are formed in school classes, we investigated the role of homophily in visible identity cues. In a multilevel framework, we examined how perceivers’ characteristics (e.g., majority or minority group membership) and four visual identity cues of classmates—religious symbols, national symbols, high-status clothing, and skin tone—shape perceptions of who is friends with whom. We collected unique friendship network and cognitive social structure (friendship perception) data from more than 1,500 adolescents (aged 16+) attending low-diversity high schools or highly-diversity vocational schools in the Netherlands. As a methodological advancement, our study is the first to employ two-layer multilevel Exponential Random Graph Models (MERGM) (cognitive social structures nested in friendship networks) to assess perceived homophily based on visual identity cues and perceivers' characteristics within classrooms. By introducing this innovative approach, our research contributes to the growing literature on networks of networks, offering new insights into the perception of individuals and social networks.