FRIENDSHIP TYPE, CLIQUE FORMATION AND THE EVERYDAY USE OF COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES IN A PEER GROUP

Abstract

This study focuses on teens' use of communication technologies to maintain connections with people from their everyday peer group. It departs from a pre-defined network (in a secondary school in Flanders, Belgium) and investigates how friendship type and clique formation (an important dynamic in this (micro) context) are related to face-to-face communication (FTFC) and the use of email, instant messaging, text messaging, telephone and social network sites in this network. Hypotheses/expectations were derived from network theory and (qualitative and quantitative) studies on the social affordances of communication technologies for adolescents. Data were collected among the 78 pupils of a fourth grade (15–16-year-olds) in a Belgian secondary school. First, dyadic quadratic assignment procedure regression analyses were run to explain the frequency of FTFC and communication through different technologies by looking at dyad characteristics (strength of ties, number of friends in common, same sex…). Second, FTFC and communication through technologies were compared for in-group versus out-group ties. The analyses show that the patterns of FTFC were sometimes reproduced (and therefore extended), and sometimes deviated from in communication through technologies. The specific function each of the studied technologies fulfilled in relation to social structure (in this network) is addressed in the discussion.

Keywords:

• ICTs
• social networking
• young people
• mobile technology

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Prof. Heidi Vandebosch, Prof. Gerald Mollenhorst and Mariek Van den Abeele for their extensive feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

Social network researchers' definition of ‘cliques’ is different from that in adolescent studies. In social network analysis, ‘clique’ is strictly defined: ‘a clique in a graph is a maximal complete subgraph of three or more nodes’ (Wasserman & Faust 1998, p. 254). In adolescent literature networks, clique simply refers to ‘“natural groupings” of (five to eight) peers, of which the members have common interests, and spend a lot of time together’ (Cotterell 2007, p. 55). In this paper, clique will be used to refer to the conceptualization of cliques in the literature on adolescence.

At the time of data collection, different SNSs were being used by Flemish teens: especially Netlog and Facebook, but also some smaller SNSs (Courtois et al. 2011; Heirman & Walrave 2011).

In Belgium, pupils choose one of about five pre-defined clusters of courses and spend most of the time with the pupils that chose the same cluster (15–25 people).

For a detailed description of the QAP, see Dekker et al. (2003) and Krackhardt (1988).