UNDERSTANDING VIRTUAL CLASSROOM FRIENDSHIP PATTERN USING SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

  • Dr M.Mahadevi, C. Kamala, S.Hemalatha, N.Monika
Keywords: Social Network Analysis (SNA), Questionnaire, Centrality measures, friendship, Psychological assessment, Virtual classroom.

Abstract

Wellman (1997) defined social networking as the set of meaningful relationship based connections among the set of people or other social entities such as business organisations. This paper is an attempt to collect data from the students of a virtual classroom, interpret how they are socially connected to each other and focuses on understanding the friendship relationship between students using Social Network Analysis (SNA). Social Network comprises of actors (nodes) and the ties (edges) that connects the actors[1]. Data set is created using Questionnaire method. Questionnaire is a valuable tool for collecting the data and in this article three questions related to the social relationship were posted to the students to understand their friendship pattern as they were attending only the online classes. Four different Social network graph is constructed for the student dataset based on the questions. SNA metrics like Degree centrality, Betweeness centrality, Closeness centrality and Eigen vector centrality measures are applied to find out the behaviour of the students in the network. By applying the social network analysis metrics, the behaviour of the students is noted and based on the results the characteristics of the students are interpreted as most popular, helping hand of the class, gossipers, bridges and the Gray cardinal. This main objective of this article is to bring out the psychological assessment of students, their feelings, their relationships with their classmatesin a virtual classroom environment.

Published
2021-09-04
How to Cite
Dr M.Mahadevi, C. Kamala, S.Hemalatha, N.Monika. (2021). UNDERSTANDING VIRTUAL CLASSROOM FRIENDSHIP PATTERN USING SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS. Design Engineering, 5937-5950. Retrieved from http://thedesignengineering.com/index.php/DE/article/view/4026
Section
Articles