Centrality measures in close group of adolescent females and their association with individual character strengths

Abstract

This paper amalgamates the field of positive psychology and social network analysis to explore what are the character strengths and virtues of individuals with high centrality measures within a close group of adolescent females. Research in the field of social network analysis in the last few decades has given a good understanding of different centrality measures. Today, we know what does an individual with high degree centrality, high betweenness centrality etc. signify in a group, this paper goes a step further, we attempt to find the correlation between individuals with high centrality measures and their character strengths. We analyze the friendship relationship of three different close groups of adolescent females studying in an undergraduate class. We construct the network of each class based on the friendship status and measure in-degree centrality, and betweenness centrality. The individuals with high centrality measures were then asked to undergo VIA character strength analysis. To investigate the correlation we quantified the character strength of the adolescent females with high centrality measures into numeric values using inverse transform and weighted sum technique. Our results show that an individual with highest in-degree centrality have kindness as one of her most prominent character strength, and individual with highest betweenness centrality have honesty, fairness and leadership as her prominent character strengths. Since an individual can be trained for particular character strengths, this correlation can help in training adolescent females (and may be extended to other groups) for specific role in an organization and society as a whole.