School ties: An analysis of homophily in an adolescent friendship network

Simon Burgess (), Eleanor Sanderson and Marcela Umana-Aponte ()

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: Homophily is the tendency to establish relationships among people who share similar characteristics or attributes. This study presents evidence of homophilic behaviour for an adolescent friendship network of 6,961 links in the West of England. We control for unobserved characteristics by estimating school and individual fixed effects and present evidence on the role of length and closeness of friendships on the degree of homophily. We also exploit the dynamics of the friendship by comparing similarities among existing and future friends. Results indicate that academic achievement, personality, educational aspirations, bad behaviour and mother’s education are essential in the friendship formation process. However, income and parents’ occupational class proved to be insignificant. We also show that the degree of homophily among friends selected from a random process is much lower than that of the observed friendships.

Keywords: Networks; Homophily; Segregation; Friendships; Adolescents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 D83 L14 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2011-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2011/wp267.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2011/wp267.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2011/wp267.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:cmpowp:11/267

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().