We investigate the role of "prestige" and the effects of hierarchy in the sociology job market over six periods between 1986-2021. The sociology job market has undergone significant transformations over the past few decades, particularly with regard to the hiring of assistant professor positions. Many scholars have investigated the role of institutional prestige on hiring (Long, Allison, and McGinnis 1979, Headworth and Freese 2015, Gaddis 2015), examining the "ranking effect", the impact that a scholar's graduating department plays a role in their employment. We extend Burris (2004) by examining the meaning and role of prestige in the Ph.D. exchange network over time. Using stochastic block modeling (Snijders, van de Bunt, Steglich 2010), we partition these networks into three different groups, and which we characterize with respect to their average placement success. We demonstrate how these dynamic partitions correlate with ranking, even as the universities that constitute them change over time. Then, we use PageRank centrality, as a measure of social capital, to predict school ranking, and show the effects of block assignment on prestige. By controlling for different university characteristics (e.g., public vs. private), and using a dynamic, stochastic partitioning, we show how the meaning and impact of prestige in hiring has changed over the period of a tightening job market.

As teleworking arrangements remain prevalent beyond the pandemic, they continue to reshape daily routines, with potential implications for individuals’ social interactions. While teleworking reduces face-to-face interactions with colleagues, it eliminates commuting time and can offer greater flexibility, potentially increasing engagement with family and friends. Prior studies have shown that teleworking influences how individuals spend time with their social relationships and with whom they interact; however, limited research applies the structural information of personal networks to explore these dynamics.

This study addresses this gap using personal network data to examine how teleworking influences the frequency of interactions with different types of close contacts. It also considers the moderating roles of personality traits, namely extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Utilising data from the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) panel, we compare teleworkers and commuters, analysing their contact frequency with family and friends.

We hypothesise that teleworking is positively associated with interaction frequency with close contacts for both family and friend ties. We also anticipate personality traits to play a significant role in teleworkers’ social engagement. To test this, we conduct a moderation analysis using multi-level modelling to account for the nested structure of ego network data.

The findings will contribute to discussions on work-life balance and the social implications of telework, demonstrating how contextual factors shape personal networks. By identifying conditions under which teleworking advances or limits social contact for individuals of varying social dispositions, the study offers insights relevant for policies on remote work and social wellbeing.

The student decision-making process in the transition from high school to university or the labor market is affected by a complex interplay of personal aspirations, motivations or social relationships. Beyond educational performance and economic factors, the support received by students from family, peers, and other adults can shape students’ choices. The present contribution investigates how different types of social support —informational, emotional, and appraisal—are mobilized within students’ personal networks and which factors influence their choices. Personal network data were collected on a sample of high school students in Southern Italy using a multiple name generator to identify significant alters within three key social circles: family, school, and social environment. Information on alters’ characteristics, along with ego-alter and alter-alter ties, has been gathered through a name interpreter. Multilevel logistic regression models have been estimated, one for each kind of support, to examine the determinants of support provision while accounting for the hierarchical nature of the data. The models undertake alters (level 1) nested within egos (level 2), and incorporate both alter characteristics (type of relationship, gender, age), and ego attributes (gender, parental education, and specific soft skill scales, such as autonomy, problem-solving, leadership). Preliminary results highlight how the provision of social support varies based on the kind of relationship between alter and ego and individual characteristics.

Keywords: Egocentric network data, Multilevel logistic model, Peer effects, Social support

Note: We acknowledge financial support under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.1, Call for tender No. 104 published on 2.2.2022 by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR), funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU– Project Title From high school to university: Assessing peers' influence in educational inequalities and performances – CUP F53D23006150006- Grant Assignment Decree No. 1060 adopted on 07/17/2023 by the Italian Ministry of Ministry of University and Research (MUR).

Nowadays, new teachers who enter the teaching profession do not stay long and leave

for other jobs in alarming numbers. In the UK, an estimated 40% of graduates who

enter the teaching profession leave in the first five years (Kyriacou and Kunc, 2007;

Sibieta, 2020), and for new teachers in shortage subjects such as math and physics,

the attrition rates are as high as 50% (Sibeta, 2020). To solve the problem of novice teacher attrition, researchers tried to explore the reasons why they leave to better understand the issue and then proposed some corresponding suggestions and theories in the process. Admittedly, it is a complicated issue, and such a leaving decision is usually caused by a combination of factors over a period of time. When studying the reasons of novice teachers’ attrition, previous

studies have focused on the personal characteristics of the novice teachers, such as

teachers’ resilience (Beltman, Mansfield and Price, 2011; Hong, 2012), while now a

few researchers have shifted their attention to the network aspects of these teachers

(Hokpins et al. 2019). Thus, I adopted social network theory, placing novice

teachers’ social networks in the center of my research, with both qualitative and quantitative data, I explored how their personal networks impact decision to stay or leave the teaching profession. To be specific, I studied 1) how novice teachers interact with other people in their networks, both with people internal and external to their work, including leaders, colleagues, students, parents of the students, and their own family members and friends, 2) how the opportunities, constraints and other things embedded in their personal networks influence their decision to leave the teaching career. The study is significant because it provides a better understanding of how novice teachers’ personal networks impact their leaving decision, and then hopefully the issue of novice teacher attrition can be decreased by coming up with methods to equip teachers with supportive networks that support their teaching career. Furthermore, when the attrition rates of novice teachers decrease, the attached challenges can also be relieved. To be more specific, the issue of teacher shortages, the high demand for teacher hiring can be relieved, and the

budgets used to recruit and train new teachers can be saved, and students

achievements do not need to be impacted by the leaving of their teachers.

We present a study examining how different teleworking modalities shape social interactions, focusing specifically on work-family conflict, interruptions during work activities, perceived managerial control, and various forms of social support. Our analysis draws on data from 4,000 employees across Switzerland, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, including detailed information on over 28,000 professional and household contacts.

Our findings illustrate multiple ways teleworking influences social relationships. For instance, the quality of the physical working environment emerges as a crucial factor in reducing interruptions over work activities and household conflicts. Interestingly, when teleworking leads to overtime and work intensification, it appears protective against conflicts with hierarchical superiors, who themselves represent an ambivalent source, simultaneously contributing to social conflict and providing essential social support. Furthermore, a mismatch between desired and actual telework intensity significantly predicts conflicts and negative experiences within social networks.

These results are based on the most extensive dataset to date of personal relationships within telework contexts, offering a significant contribution by integrating social network analysis into the literature on telework.

Educators operate within layered structural constraints—bureaucratic, technological, and professional—that shape how they access, share, and create resources. We investigate these constraints by drawing on a qualitative mixed-methods study of UK teachers’ personal networks. We focus on how teachers adapt to these constraints through formal and informal means relying on both school-based and external social contacts.

Findings suggest that educators adopt different strategies in selecting collaborators and sustaining professional relationships based on structural constraints. For example, institutional policies and hierarchies often limit direct collaboration, creating negative space where informal networks emerge as counterstructures. Some teachers prioritise closure, seeking shared norms, community building, and institutional alignment, while others take on brokerage roles, reaching beyond their immediate circles to integrate external resources. However, these logics are not mutually exclusive - educators shift between them in response to technological and institutional barriers, such as policies restricting resource sharing via platforms like OneDrive.

Educators with greater institutional support are more likely to act as brokers, while those in precarious roles (early-career teachers) tend to be limited by their perceived network isolation. This study highlights the use of personal networks in understanding how educators navigate structural affordances and pressures to bridge structural divides.

As AI resource creation tools are increasingly integrated into teachers’ professional work, the presentation will also consider how network structures might shape their adoption and dissemination across professional communities. The findings provide insights into how institutions can better support collaborative resource creation as digital and AI-driven tools reshape professional knowledge work.

This article examines the extent to which neighborhood peers influence families’ school choice, and whether this effect varies according to socioeconomic background. It uses geocoded administrative data from Chile, where families have to rank and apply to schools through a centralized admission system. I build a unique longitudinal dataset linking four applicant cohorts to their nearest neighbors who applied to the same grade the years before, which allows to account for several endogeneity issues when identifying peer effects. I define peer group with egocentric neighborhoods, a series of local environments surrounding each student based on geographic distance and population density that approximate meaningful exposure and social interactions. I estimate a series of logistic regression models that analyze similarity in applications to specific schools as well as similarity in the ranking of these applications. Then, I use an instrumental variable approach to assess whether choosing the same school as neighbors leads to applying or not to schools with different student body composition, test scores, and instructional resources.

The results indicate that low-SES students are most likely to conform to their neighbors' choice, especially when the latter are from slightly higher-SES background. This pattern suggests that low-SES families face greater informational frictions in the school market or may face higher social costs of deviating from neighborhood peer norms, such that the information acquired through neighborhood interactions becomes more consequential for choosing a school among these groups. Then, the study shows that choosing the same school as more (dis)advantaged neighbors is (causally) associated with application to different schools, especially regarding the student body socioeconomic composition.

I conclude that geographically embedded social interactions influence the process of school choice and thereby may contribute to sustaining school segregation, with potential far-reaching consequences for the persistence of social inequality. The results also highlight the need for public policy to consider neighborhood social interactions to mitigate spatial and social disparities in educational opportunities.

This study investigates the role of social networks on southern Italian students’ decision to relocate to central and northern Italy for higher education. Indeed, student mobility in Italy is predominantly a unidirectional phenomenon, taking place almost exclusively from the South to the Center and the North, further exacerbating existing regional inequalities. While the academic literature has identified key drivers of student migration, such as academic performance, social class of origin, labor market conditions, and university quality, the role of social influence has remained underexplored. To address this gap in the existing literature, a survey was administered to 209 high school students in their final year from two high schools in a southern Italian city. Social network influence was assessed using personal network analysis, and logistic regression models were computed to assess the impact of students’ personal networks on their higher education mobility decisions, while controlling for a comprehensive set of personal and contextual factors. The findings reveal a significant association between students’ mobility choices and social network measures, with the most critical factor being the proportion of their social contacts who had pursued or intended to pursue similar education and mobility paths. Noteworthy, the inclusion of social network influence measures diminished the impact of traditionally considered socio-demographic determinants, suggesting that while such factors may create the conditions for social ties to develop, it is the networks themselves that provide the mechanisms through which students adopt similar educational trajectories, thereby increasing the likelihood of migration.

Study-abroad (SA) SLA research has demonstrated considerable variation in learners’ L2 gains. A crucial factor contributing to this varied picture is students’ interactions in their social networks during their time abroad.

While network science has consistently linked central positions to leadership figures, leadership emergence remains unexplored in SA SLA. Our study examines a complete cohort of 30 students from a large U.S. university enrolled in an intensive 3-month Arabic program in Amman, investigating factors that influence language progress and leadership emergence, particularly focusing on leaders who facilitate access to target-language (TL) speakers. Through a mixed-methods approach combining longitudinal quantitative Social Network Analysis supplemented and interviews, our findings reveal ① three predictors of progress measured with Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI): time spent learning the L2 out of class, perception of group integration, and closeness in the student network, alongside a near-significant impact of being nominated as a facilitator of communication with TL speakers. ② Emerging leaders exhibited high presojourn Arabic proficiency, high scores on multilingualism, and greater time spent learning the language out-of-class. ③ Students identified as facilitators of interactions with Arab speakers shared most of the same traits, but with an additional important predictor being their voterank – a metric reflecting optimal potential to influence others in the network.

The study corroborates the role of social network variables in linguistic progress during SA and pioneers the investigation of factors leading to the emergence of leaders during SA, while validating the predictive validity of centrality metrics.

Myriad studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of active learning methods over traditional, lecture-based teaching methods in university-level science courses. In the field of physics, education researchers have developed a handful of different active learning methods that are widely implemented at colleges and universities; however, no studies have systematically identified distinguishing features of these methods. Given that opportunities to engage in peer discussions are a core premise of active learning, one feature of interest is how different methods shape peer interactions. As part of a large national research project, we have collected students’ self-reported peer interactions in 19 introductory physics courses in the United States taught using one of four well-established, but distinct, active learning methods: Peer Instruction, SCALE-UP, Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE), and Tutorials in Introductory Physics. We use temporal exponential random graph models to identify the types of peer interactions that form from the beginning to the end of the semester in each course. The results, which do not vary across active learning methods, class sizes, or classroom layouts, indicate that students develop connections with small groups of peers to form triadic closure. All students, regardless of their academic performance, form connections with a similar number of peers. These findings illuminate two social network signatures of active learning physics classrooms: triadic closure and equal connectivity.

Scholars highlight that peer interactions not only shape educational choices but also play a crucial role in developing social and personal competencies. A social network analysis approach offers valuable insights into how student relationships influence the acquisition of soft skills within the school environment. These skills—such as communication, collaboration, leadership, problem-solving, and emotional management—are increasingly recognized as essential for academic success and professional growth. Within this framework, this study examines the impact of peer relationships on individual soft skills across different types of social interactions. Primary data were collected during the 2024–2025 academic year through a survey conducted in high schools across the Campania region in Southern Italy. The study employed a proportional quota sampling method, selecting 28 out of 324 schools and involving approximately 1,500 final-year students. A whole-network design was implemented to capture various dimensions of social interactions, with students identifying up to five classmates in four relational categories: best friends, academic support, personal advice, and discussions about future aspirations. The questionnaire incorporated the validated 3SQ psychometric scale, which assesses ten dimensions (e.g., trust, empathy, leadership, openness, collaboration, and autonomy). To evaluate the impact of social relationships on soft skill development, network models were applied to analyze how different types of interactions contribute to shaping specific competencies. The findings offer deeper insights into the role of peer influence in fostering essential skills for students’ academic and personal growth.

Note: We acknowledge financial support under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.1, Call for tender No. 104 published on 2.2.2022 by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR), funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU– Project Title From high school to university: Assessing peers' influence in educational inequalities and performances – CUP F53D23006150006- Grant Assignment Decree No. 1060 adopted on 07/17/2023 by the Italian Ministry of Ministry of University and Research (MUR).