Giving chance a helping hand

When students are able to form friendships and build strong networks during their time at university, they benefit in deep ways both during their studies and later in life. Take students who study for exams with their friends, for instance: they have better odds of passing (ETH News article from 10.01.2019). Four researchers at ETH Zurich’s Social Networks Lab have now built on this insight. As part of the Swiss StudentLife study, they used multiple approaches to tackle the question of how students form networks and what events serve to strengthen their relationship ties. The three-​year study was based on an experimental early intervention in students’ peer networks, and the findings were published external page in an article in Scientific Reports.

First-​ever in-​depth examination

The study used two introduction events for incoming students in an undergraduate engineering programme at a Swiss university. The events were intended to provide students with information and give them an opportunity to freely network with each other. “But there are a lot of implicit assumptions there. No one had ever tried systematically researching what the actual social impact of these events is,” explains Christoph Stadtfeld, one of the authors of the study. The idea was partially inspired by calls from teaching staff to investigate how relationship networks form and develop among students over longer periods of time.

The two information events were identical. Each was two hours long, and they were held either two or three months before the start of the semester. The researchers’ intervention took place following a short introductory speech: students were divided into groups – each consisting of five to nine people – for a campus tour, a discussion session and a shared meal. These activities gave them the opportunity to get to know one another. Although students were randomly assigned to the intervention groups, researchers did take care to ensure that the groups had a sex composition similar to that of the students’ incoming class and that there were no male-​only or female-​only groups. After the event, around 200 students – approximately half of whom had participated – were surveyed about their social lives at six different times over the course of roughly a year. Questions touched on points such as which fellow students they were befriending and working together with.

Turning theory into practice

According to researchers, more interaction and contact between social groups creates more equal opportunities not only during students’ time at university, but also later when they enter the job market. The reason? When students actively maintain relationship and friendship ties with one another, they share more information that is relevant both to their fields of study and their careers.

But what does this mean for ETH Zurich? Stadtfeld says that his research group is in an ongoing dialogue with departments and instructors in order to integrate findings from their multi-​year research project into how teaching is conducted at ETH. What’s more, ETH’s long-​established practice of holding pre-​semester orientation events has been shown to be a good investment. Especially now that so many events have gone online because of the coronavirus pandemic, it is important not to lose early opportunities for students’ social integration, says Stadtfeld.