This presentation is about social status in classroom discussions among students in the second year of secondary education in Flanders (Belgium). Students name friends in a standardized network questionnaire. There are 1) reciprocal and 2) non-reciprocal friendship names in the questionnaire. For example, 1) individual X and Y name each other as friends, 2) individual X names individual Y as a friend but not vice versa. We use the non-reciprocal friendship designations to calculate individual social status in the class (via maximum likelihood with an expectation-maximization procedure). Previous research found a relationship between this social status calculation and other variables such as age (Ball & Newman, 2013). In this study, we will further test the validity of the social status measure. We connect social status with filmed observational data from two classroom discussions (of about 50 minutes each) among the same students (without the presence of researchers) and recorded gender, ethnicity and occupational status of the parents. We use these data to examine whether there is a relationship between social status and speaking time in a classroom debate. The level of social status in a class likely influences the amount of speaking time in a class. It is likely that the higher the individual status, the more students can speak during class discussions.
Reference:
Ball & Newman, “Friendship Networks and Social Status”, Network Science, 1 (1): 16-30.
