Modelling Students Social Networks

Student: Morozova Elena

Educational Programme: Master

Year of Graduation: 2014

This Master's thesis is titled "Modelling Students Social Networks" and devoted to the study of the best way of obtaining and presenting the data for the particular chosen social network. In terms of this paper optimality implies as a possibility of using the results obtained in practice immediately after analysis by all the people who are interested in it, even if they don’t have enough background in social networks theory. In this study we investigated the social network of three groups of students from the first course of the Faculty of Economics, High School of Economics, Nizhny Novgorod branch. Graphical method was applied to modeling said social network in its two variations: including and links with other groups of students from this course and excluding those said links. Different types of relationships between agents were visualized in graphs, the main characteristics of the social network for every variation were also calculated and compared to each other.  Based on this simulation, the conclusion on the feasibility of the exclusion of different kind of external relations was made, and the key agents of the network were identified.The work includes theoretical part devoted to covering the basic concepts of the theory of social networks, its properties, ways of descriptions, parameters and characteristics, as well as graphically modeling networks and using exponential random graph models. All the main conceptions of the second method were described, starting from theoretical survey and finishing with estimating the model parameters. The graphical method of modeling was described during the empirical part of the study. Data for the empirical part was obtained by questioning the first year students and then processed for using it in software packages, specifically Pajek. The paper also contains tables and graphs on the observable network.The thesis consists of an introduction, three chapters, conclusion, list of applications and list of references.

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