Evolution of School Activities and Friendship Networks for College Students: Under Social Contexts of Different Gender Composition

In this paper we both study school activities of college students how to change through friendship networks, and whether we can find different transitional process under social contexts of different gender composition. When freshmen enter the university, they start to build up their own school activities including study-oriented dimension and social-oriented dimension, for example, going out with friends or discussing the study with friends. We examine the activities how to covariate with friendship networks. Besides, boys and girls show different ways to establish friendship relations. Girls desire more intimate relationship and homogenous group of friends, and boys sustain and make friends in joint activities to enlarge heterogeneous relations. If boys are more than girls in the class, the masculine context maybe can format social norms of gender belief to influence or moderate college students＇ friendship networks and school activities, and vice versa. Our data are taken from 6 classes (including 2 all-girls, 2 all-boys, 2 mixed-gender) in the same semester in the same college, and in four-wave longitudinal tracking sources. Evolution processes are analyzed with a stochastic actor-based model (SIENA). Preliminarily, we found social contexts of different gender composition can moderate college students＇ friendship networks and school activities. In all-boys classes, school activities will influence friendship selection but not friendship influence processes. In all-girls classes, school activities is not significant for both friendship selection and influence processes.