Why students form close-nit groups in schools found

Schools that offer students more choice are more likely to be rank-ordered, cliquish and segregated by race, age, gender and social status, a new US study has found.
Students in some schools form more cliquish, hierarchical and segregated social structures than in others.
It turns out that the organisational setting of a school itself, its "network ecology," has a big impact, researchers said.
Schools that offer students more elective courses, more ways to complete requirements, a bigger range of potential friends, more freedom to select seats in a classroom are more likely to be rank-ordered, cliquish and segregated by race, age, gender and social status, researchers found.

By contrast, pecking orders, cliques and self-segregation are less prevalent in schools and classrooms that limit social choices and prescribe formats of interaction, researchers said.
Smaller schools inherently offer a smaller choice of potential friends, so the "cost" of excluding people from a social group is higher.

In addition, structured classrooms guide student interactions in prescribed routes and encourage students to interact on the basis of schoolwork rather than on the basis of their external social lives.
"Educators often suspect that the social world of adolescents is beyond their reach and out of their control, but that's not really so," said lead author Daniel A McFarland, professor of education at Stanford Graduate School of Education.

"They have leverage, because the schools are indirectly shaping conditions in these societies," said McFarland.
The study draws on an analysis of two datasets about friendships. One considers friendships at the classroom level and the other at the school level.
Researchers found that large schools tend to accentuate the quest by adolescents for friends who are similar to themselves, an instinct that sociologists call "homophily."
Bigger schools offer a broader range of potential friends, as well as greater exposure to people who are different.
It's a mixture of freedom and uncertainty that spurs students to cluster by race, gender, age and socioeconomic status, researchers said.

But a school's size is only one factor. The researchers also found that a school's openness to choice spurs cliques and social-status hierarchies as well.
In schools with a strong focus on academics, where teachers have a hand in setting the pace and controlling classroom interactions, teenagers are less likely to form friendships based on social attitudes imported from outside the school.
The study was published in the journal American Sociological Review.