How do friendship and advice ties emerge? A case study of graduate student social networks

In this paper, we analyze the factors that are most likely to explain the formation of friendship and advice ties among 44 students from a professional STEM graduate program. To answer our research questions, we investigate how students' characteristics influence the formation of their friendship and advice networks using descriptive network analysis, community detection, and Exponential Random Graph Models. The results show that the formation of friendship and advice ties is mostly driven by demographic homophily and prior group activities. Our findings also suggest that female students were more constrained in their friendship and advice networks than male students. We discuss the implications of these results for how graduate students' social networks form at the beginning of their program.