Abstract
This study investigates the pattern of social interaction and integration among 31 faculty members and 84 master’s students who enrolled in a cohort-wide core course, PAD 507: Professional Applications I, offered by the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany–SUNY during the Fall 2007 semester. A primary goal of the cohort-wide course is to encourage students to mix with other students in a diverse educational environment and provide better access to faculty members. However, our findings from longitudinal social network analysis suggest that students strongly prefer interpersonal relationships with similar others—what social network analysts refer to as a preference for homophily. That is, students tend to build networks characterized by shared attributes, such as gender, domestic/international status, and participation in a graduate assistantship, despite efforts in PAD 507 to encourage social mixing. Students do tend to rapidly broaden their networks through course and group activities during the first 8 weeks of the term, but the newly constructed relationships tend to reinforce a preference for “birds of a feather” to flock together. Moreover, the networks shaped in early stages of the term appear to persist. For programs that wish to encourage social mixing (and we argue that they should), our findings suggest that homophily is difficult but not impossible to counterbalance through programmatic choices.
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