Facebook Maps Networks

It seems that birds of a feather do flock together. A new study by members of Harvard’s Sociology Department and a UCLA sociology professor using Facebook to analyze the social habits of undergraduates shows fairly homogenous friend networks among college students.

The research team, which includes three sociology professors and two Harvard graduate students, is trying to better understand how students form social ties and whether factors such as race, gender, or personal interests affect relationship formation. The project was initiated in March 2006 and is slotted to continue until 2009.

According to the study thus far, race and gender appear to have an influence on social networks. African-American students tend to have the largest social networks, followed by students of mixed race. White students have the lowest number of Facebook friends, and women are more inclined to have a more diverse social network than males.

Additionally, data collected thus far shows that white students tend to have more racially homogenous Facebook networks, a finding that coincides with the accepted phenomenon of social homopholy—the idea that “birds of a feather flock together.”

“It is kind of amazing that it shows up here [on Facebook] as well. Maybe it is an indication that these aren’t just virtual ties,” Kevin M. Lewis, a third-year Ph.D candidate working on the project, said.

The subject pool for the research is the class of 2009 at an undisclosed American college, according to Lewis. He said that the university has a racially diverse student population and a roughly equal number of males and females.

In addition to getting the approval of the college being studied, the team also received permission from Facebook and the Harvard Institutional Review Board.

Although students do not individually consent to having their profiles studied, the sociologists emphasized that they are following all necessary guidelines and taking the greatest precautions to protect student privacy.

“We don’t stand to profit by doing this. Unlike commercial enterprises who are collecting your data, we are monitored by a third party whose sole purpose is to protect our research subjects,” sociology associate professor Jason Kaufman ’93 said. Kaufman is joined by UCLA sociology professor Andreas Wimmer and Harvard medical sociology professor Nicholas A. Christakis in heading the project.

Each year on March 10 and March 11, the researchers download data from students’ profiles from the college network and strip the data of any information that can be used to identify individuals. The researchers do not use information from students who have restricted other students in their own college’s network from accessing their profile.

The collected data will be available to other researchers through the Harvard-MIT Data Center with the permission of the Harvard researchers, however.

Most Harvard students asked did not protest the use of their information in research of this kind.

“I’d be much more concerned if they were monitoring my Facebook activity rather than what I put on Facebook,” Eve H. Bryggman ’10 said. “The image I put out there is what I want to present.”