This data is about a friendship network in a Dutch school class. The data were collected between September 2003 and June 2004 by Andrea Knecht, supervised by Chris Baerveldt, at the Department of Sociology of the University of Utrecht (NL). The entire study is reported in Knecht (2008).
The 26 students were followed over their first year at secondary school during which friendship networks as well as other data were assessed at four time points at intervals of three months. There were 17 girls and 9 boys in the class, aged 11-13 at the beginning of the school year. Network data were assessed by asking students to indicate up to twelve classmates which they considered good friends.
Delinquency is defined as a rounded average over four types of minor delinquency (stealing, vandalism, graffiti, and fighting), measured in each of the four waves of data collection. The five-point scale ranged from never' to more than 10 times', and the distribution is highly skewed. In a range of 1-5, the mode was 1 at all four waves, the average rose over time from 1.4 to 2.0, and the value 5 was never observed.
Details
The network contains the following attributes:
"deli" rounded average of four items (stealing, vandalizing, fighting, graffiti); categories: frequency over last three months, 1 = never, 2 = once, 3 = 2-4 times, 4 = 5-10 times, 5 = more than 10 times; 0 = missing
alcoholalcohol "How often did you drink alcohol with friends in the last three months?" categories: 1 = never, 2 = once, 3 = 2-4 times, 4 = 5-10 times, 5 = more than 10 times; 0 = missing. Only waves 2-4
"gender"(1 = girl, 2 = boy)
"age"years
"ethnic"Ethnicity (1 = Dutch, 2 = other, 0 = missing)
"religion"(1 = Christian, 2 = non-religious, 3 = non-Christian religion, 0 = missing)