This paper explores the use of the Core Discussion Network (CDN) methodology for analyzing personal networks. We discuss the method’s origins and the specifics of its implementation, followed by a brief overview of findings from international studies. Using data collected in 2021 from 270 first-year undergraduate and graduate students at a top-tier Russian university, we present results from an empirical study. The analysis focused on network parameters such as the size and density of ego-alter ties, alongside the socio-demographic characteristics of alters (gender, age, and relationship to ego). Results indicate that the structure of CDNs among Russian students in 2021 closely mirrors that of Ukrainian respondents from prior studies in terms of connection counts, proportions of relatives versus non-relatives, and the percentage of respondents reporting no discussion partners. However, variation coefficients for gender and age were distinct compared to earlier research, though direct comparisons were constrained by inconsistent reporting of standard deviations in existing literature. Our findings highlight the need for standardized metrics in personal network analysis to improve cross-study comparability.

Social integration is known to be positively related to academic performance. It is also well-known to play a different role for (self-identified) men and women. In this paper, we examine the differences seen in the correlations between academic performance and social integration for men and women. Gender was determined on the basis of self-identification. Utilizing the data from the Russian representative panel of late adolescents (N = 4,400), we demonstrate a positive relationship between the core discussion network size as a measure of social integration. Using moderation analysis, we demonstrate that the role of social integration for women is more pronounced than for men. Our findings show the importance of social integration and support for girls and women and suggest possible policy implications.

Anorexia is a serious threat to young women's wellbeing worldwide. The effectiveness of mental health intervention and treatment is often evaluated on the basis of changes in the personal networks; however, the development of such measures for young women with anorexia is constrained due to the lack of quantitative descriptions of their social networks. We aim to fill this substantial gap. In this paper, we identify the basic properties of these women's personal networks such as size, structure, and proportion of kin connections. The empirical analysis, using a concentric circles methodology, is based on 50 ego networks constructed on data drawn from interviews with Russian-speaking bloggers who have been diagnosed with anorexia and write about this condition. We conclude that young women with anorexia tend to support a limited number of social ties; they are prone to select women as alters, but do not have a preference to connect to their relatives. Further research is needed to elucidate whether these personal network characteristics are similar among women with anorexia who belong to different age, ethnic, cultural, and income groups.

Women have been systematically disadvantaged in the labour market. This could be explained by a complex association of factors, such as the lower speed of women’s professional growth within companies, their under-representation in management positions, and the unequal distribution of caregiving and housework between men and women. The rise of the gig economy—a market system that is based on hiring independent contractors and freelance workers as opposed to creating full-time contracts—has brought researchers and policymakers into a discussion on the effects of online platforms and flexible work arrangements on labour market gender parity. In this study, we examine the case of the largest online English-language school in Eastern Europe, Skyeng. Data on 6,461,404 lessons given by 13,571 teachers demonstrate that women had fewer working hours than men in most age categories, but especially for ages 30–35. The workload deficit for the women could be partly attributed to the fact that they worked less often than the men did in the evenings (7–10 p.m.). We conclude that, despite the flexible work arrangements the gig economy has offered, the women taught fewer classes than the men (i.e., having fewer paid working hours), which in turn led to a gender pay gap. The rapid growth of the gig economy makes it important to monitor gender-gap dynamics as well as discuss potential mechanisms eliminating gender inequality in the labour market.

As social interactions are increasingly taking place in the digital environment, online friendship and its effects on various life outcomes from health to happiness attract growing research attention. In most studies, online ties are treated as representing a single type of relationship. However, our online friendship networks are not homogeneous and could include close connections, e.g. a partner, as well as people we have never met in person. In this paper, we investigate the potentially differential effects of online friendship ties on mental health. Using data from a Russian panel study (N = 4,400), we find that - consistently with previous research - the number of online friends correlates with depression symptoms. However, this is true only for networks that do not exceed Dunbar's number in size (N <= 150) and only for core but not peripheral nodes of a friendship network. The findings suggest that online friendship could encode different types of social relationships that should be treated separately while investigating the association between online social integration and life outcomes, in particular well-being or mental health.

In adolescents and young adults, physical and mental health are known to be associated with sleep. In this paper, we consider the connection between health indicators and sleep patterns. We collected and analyzed data of 267 master's and bachelor's degree students from 21 educational programs at one elite Russian university. Somatic health and mental health were measured using, respectively, the 8-item and the 15-item Patient Health Questionnaire, and sleep patterns were identified using the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire. The results indicated that shorter sleep time, later bedtime, and later rising time on workdays were associated with student somatic health. Shorter sleep on workdays was positively associated with the severity of depressive symptoms. Our findings highlight the importance of healthy sleep behavior for student health.

Innovation in higher education teaching is essential to respond to global challenges and actively improve teaching (e.g. through new technologies), necessitating the implementation of educational reform programmes that fund educational innovations. Although currently deployed strategies frequently promote networks between innovators to diffuse educational innovations, little is known about the efficiency of these networks or whether they promote innovation diffusion. This study investigates a network comprising 88 higher education teachers who received funding for their educational innovations in a German university. We collected longitudinal data by asking higher education teachers from whom they adopted innovative teaching ideas and requesting self-reports on innovative teaching climate. Our findings show that the teachers’ social network had a smaller path length and more clustering than might be expected by chance. This observation might indicate that the examined educational innovation network exhibits a small-world property and allows efficient exchange of ideas among the teachers. In line with our hypotheses, the network’s initial tendency toward hierarchy and homophily decreased over time in response to strategies and network interventions. In summary, this study provides initial empirical support that educational reform programmes can create efficient educational innovation networks, facilitating innovation diffusion and promoting change in higher education teaching.

Поведение человека зависит от многих факторов, в том числе и от социального окружения. В течение последних десятилетий активно разрабатывались модели, оценивающие влияние окружения на индивида. В настоящей статье описывается стохастическое акторно-ориентированное моделирование (САОМ), позволяющее тестировать гипотезы, касающиеся структурной эволюции социальных сетей, а также детально анализировать коэволюцию сетей и поведения. В работе описаны теоретико-методологические основания САОМ, приведены требования к дизайну исследований и процедурам сбора данных, рассмотрены спецификация модели и пример коэволюции сети и академических достижений учащихся, отмечены ограничения метода, а также предложены перспективные направления для дальнейшего изучения. Мы указываем, что анализ с использованием САОМ предпочтителен для небольших социальных сетей с низкой ротацией, в частности, организационных подразделений и учебных групп. В статье отмечается, что существующие работы рассматривают преимущественно образовательный контекст и социальные сети молодых людей, что не позволяет сделать выводы о механизмах эволюции социальных связей в общностях иного типа и для представителей других возрастных групп. Также отмечается, что подавляющее большинство исследований реализовано на данных о западных демократических обществах, что свидетельствует о необходимости изучения разнообразных выборок. Благодарность. Исследование осуществлено в рамках Программы фундаментальных исследований НИУ ВШЭ.

Academic achievements play an important role in an individual’s professional development, and are also considered one of the main characteristics of an education system. Academic achievements are associated with multiple factors, including the social environment of students. In this paper we review the studies that use stochastic actororiented models to examine the effects of social networks on academic achievements. We consider both the results and designs of existing studies and outline potential avenues for future research. We demonstrate that the majority of studies analyze the networks of positive relationships in schools. Only a few studies are based on data from universities. We also conclude that the majority of studies are based on data from western democracies. These findings can be considered as a basis for further empirical analysis.

The influence of individual characteristics on social structures is a key issue in sociological research. This study examines the evolution of social networks among freshmen at a Russian university to determine the role of generalized trust in social integration. It is demonstrated that trustful individuals are more likely to enter into relationships with people with whom they have no mutual friends and to expand their social networks. Empirical evidence is consistent with the theoretical prediction of sociologists, James S. Colman and Eric M. Uslaner in particular, that interpersonal trust has an impact on the whole social structure, which means it determines how societies function.

Behavior diffusion through social networks is a key social process. It may be guided by various factors such as network topology, type of propagated behavior, and the strength of network connections. In this paper, we claim that the type of social interactions is also an important ingredient of behavioral diffusion. We examine the spread of academic achievements of first-year undergraduate students through friendship and study assistance networks, applying stochastic actor-oriented modeling. We show that informal social connections transmit performance while instrumental connections do not. The results highlight the importance of friendship in educational environments and contribute to debates on the behavior spread in social networks.

Shorter sleep is known to be negatively associated with academic performance. However, this result has mostly been found in homogenous samples (e.g., students from one university) or when using relative measures of academic performance, such as grade point average. Consequently, the relationship between academic performance and sleep patterns at the population level is not well understood. In this paper, we examined the relationship between academic performance as measured by a standardized test and sleep patterns using data from a Russian panel study (N = 4,400) that was nationally representative for one age cohort (20-21 years old). In addition to self-reported sleep patterns, the data set contained information about participants' online activities over a period of up to 10 years, which allowed us to track the evolution of this relationship over time. We found that high academic performance was associated with shorter sleep, later bedtime, and increased online activity at night. The relationship between high academic performance and online activity at night was stable over a period of 5 years. Our findings suggest that the relationship between academic performance and sleep patterns can be more complex than previously believed and that high performance may be achieved at the expense of individual well-being.

Individual performance and reputation within a company are major factors that influence wage distribution, promotion and firing. Due to the complexity and collaborative nature of contemporary business processes, the evaluation of individual impact in the majority of organizations is an ambiguous and non-trivial task. Existing performance appraisal approaches are often affected by individuals biased judgements, and organizations are dissatisfied with the results of evaluations. We assert that employees can provide accurate measurement of their peer performance in a complex collaborative environment. We propose a novel metric, the Peer Rank Score (PRS), that evaluates individual reputations and the non-quantifiable individual impact. PRS is based on pairwise comparisons of employees. We show high robustness of the algorithm on simulations and empirically validate it for a genetic testing company on more than one thousand employees using peer reviews over the course of three years.

The introduction of digital technologies in everyday practices and the reduction of the age of children's access to the Internet creates the need to reflect on the potential benefits and risks associated with digitalization. The article summarizes the main data on the impact of the Internet, in particular social networks, on life satisfaction indicators and symptoms of depression in adolescents. The results of empirical studies conducted in different countries are ambiguous and do not allow to speak about universal effects that apply to all children and adolescents. We assume that the lack of unambiguous conclusions about the impact of digital technologies is due to the nonlinearity and differential effects. In particular, the power of influence depends on the individual characteristics, the intensity of the use of technology, socio-economic characteristics of the child's environment. This review shows the need for a differentiated approach to research the impact of digitalization on the well-being of children and to the practices of supporting the child in his development of the Internet.

This p aper aims to explore the analysis and prediction of the scientific research work. Authors examine the scientific research work as collective complex action. Authors investigated the methodological basis of the team formation for the scientific research. The scientific research was studied as a complex action which consisted of many components. Such approach resulted in the formal model of the scientific activity. Authors of the paper modelled the agent-based environment of the scientific activity. The model was calibrated based on data from scientific collaborations of science and technology center Gazpromneft. Results of agent-based models proved the possibilities of the methodological approach. The obtained results go in line with the predictive abilities of the imitations models.

Social media are often conceived as a mechanism of echo-chamber formation. In this paper we show that in the Russian context this effect is limited. Specifically, we show that audiences of media channels represented in the leading Russian social network VK, as well as their activities, significantly overlap. The audience of the oppositional TV channel is connected with the mainstream media through acceptable mediators such as a neutral business channel. We show this with the data from the VK pages of twelve leading Russian media channels and seven millions users.

Online social networks (OSNs) play an increasingly important role in news dissemination and consumption, attracting such traditional media outlets as TV channels with growing online audiences. Online news streams require appropriate instruments for analysis. One of such tools is topic modeling (TM). However, TM has a set of limitations (the problem of topic number choice and the algorithm instability, among others) that must be addressed specifically for the task of sociological online news analysis. In this paper, we propose a full-cycle methodology for such study: from choosing the optimal topic number to the extraction of stable topics and analysis of TM results. We illustrate it with an analysis of online news stream of 164,426 messages formed by twelve national TV channels during a one-year period in a leading Russian OSN. We show that our method can easily reveal associations between news topics and user feedback, including sharing behavior. Additionally, we show how uneven distribution of document quantities and lengths over classes (TV channels) could affect TM results.

A balanced social structure within an organization is often considered as one of the major factors of company success. Thus the analysis of organizational networks is an important direction in network and organizational studies. In this paper we explore the mechanisms of collaboration using information about scientific paper coauthorships. We reveal the collaboration mechanisms within research departments of top Russian oil companies, Gazpromneft, Bashneft, Lukoil, and Tatneft. We examine the role of management in professional community formation.

Homophily - tendency for people to form social connections with similar others - is one of the key topics in social network analysis. It indicates to what extent people tend to be similar to their friends and in what dimensions. For the long time homophily was just an index of the social similarity, but for the recent years the interest for the homophily formation, dynamics and multidimensionality increased. In this paper we investigate the homophily in such social constructed behavior as food consumption and academic achievements. The study of body mass index in social network context reveals the presence of homophily, which means that persons with similar constitution are more likely to be interconnected with each other. Interestingly, that healthy food consumption has no impact on social network formation, but there is homophily based on fast food consumption. Thus, 'bad habits' are stronger forces for the social ties formation. This results show that social constructed behavior is an important component on the process of social network formation.

Homophily is considered by network scientists as one of the major mechanisms of social network formation. However, the role of dynamic homophily in the network growth process has not been investigated in detail yet. In this paper, we estimate the role of homophily by various attributes at different stages of online network formation process. We consider the process of online friendship formation in the Vkontakte social networking site among first-year students at a Russian university. We reveal that at the beginning of the network formation a similarity in gender and score in entrance exams plays the key role, while by the end of network establishment period the role of the same group affiliation becomes more important. We explain the results with the tendency of students to follow different strategies to control the information flow in their social environment.