Order ID | 7197235146 |
Subject | Sociology |
Topic | Assignment 2A |
Type | Essay |
Writer level | College |
Style | MLA |
Sources / references | 0 |
Language | English(U.S.) |
Description / paper instructions
Create a network diagram – look at attached examples
e.g. discussing family structure or relationshipsDiscuss: – what the data shows – positive or negative relationships – how you collected the data (must be your own data not from a published source) – limitations of the study Please look at attached examples Grading: Identify a population of persons or things (nodes) connected by one or more relations (flows). Collect relational data on this population and graph the resulting social structure. Identify a structural feature of the population you have collected data on. Describe the nodes, the flow(s), and state why you selected this population. Evaluate the quality of your data. State what (if anything) you learned about this population from investigation of its structure. Be sure to represent your network as a graph, and be sure that you discuss an expectation with respect to your data, and then what you found, and what the limitations of your study might be. Max 3 pages, including figures/tables, references. Relationship between Friend Groups and Class Rank The population of the data is the 16 participants of my gap year program in China and thus each individual is represented by a node. We are all connected by the shared participation in the program and the shared identity of American students studying abroad at a local Chinese high school. The edges within the system represent the friendships between the nodes/participants. While we were all friendly with each other, there was a division of friend ‘groups’ that formed throughout the year. Friend groups consist of nodes that share edges with all of the other nodes in the group. This is represented by the two clusters within the data. There are outliers of the data that don’t fully belong to either group. The structural feature of the population is the academic ranking of participants in their corresponding Chinese class. We were all divided into either an Advanced or Intermediate Chinese Class and then ranked based on academic performance. I chose this population because I wanted to see if there was any correlation between friend groups and their ranking within the two classes. Ranking is represented by the number in each node. My initial assumption would be that people who share similar rank will share closer ties and thus form a friend group. As seen in the data, the top 4 students of the Advanced class constituted a friend group. Whereas the two lowest ranked students of each class formed a friend group with an additional four students. Two of those four additional students were part of the bottom 50% of their class. The four remaining nodes in the data do not fall into either of the two friend groups but still maintained loose friendships with other members of the two main groups. This exposes a limitation that the strict division of two friend groups is not completely accurate because participants were still friends with members of both groups, placing them in a gray area of not belonging to either of them. Another limitation is that this data is not representative of most friend groups within academic settings. Many classes do not have a ranking system and therefore a division from academic performance cannot be speculated. Additionally, since the ranking was strictly based on our performance in Chinese language classes and did not cover other subjects that we partook in, the data is not entirely valid. It also excludes other international students that were included in the friend groups and had influence over the creation of the groups.
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