Do common interests of students play a role in friendship?

Abstract

At university, students want to make friends with people who share common interests. Hence we build a friendship network to research students’ social situation. Firstly, through the data, we establish the friendship network, then we detect structure of friendship networks and study the rationality of community detection based on their interests. By comparing the clustering coefficient of the communities under different interests, we find that the interests of computer game plays an important role in the internal connection of a community. We explore the rules of contact among class members and provide suggestions for enhancing class cohesion.