Community Structure in Online Collegiate Social Networks

We study the structure of social networks of students by examining the graphs of Facebook “friendships” at five American universities at a single point in time. We investigate each single-institution network’s community structure and employ graphical and quantitative tools, including standardized pair-counting methods, to measure the correlations between the network communities and a set of self-identified user characteristics (residence, class year, major, and high school). We review the basic properties and statistics of the employed pair-counting indices and recall, in simplified notation, a useful analytical formula for the z-score of the Rand coefficient. Our study illustrates how to examine different instances of social networks constructed in similar environments, emphasizes the array of social forces that combine to form “communities,” and leads to comparative observations about online social lives that can be used to infer comparisons about offline social structures.