School Choice: Digital Prints and Network Analysis

Resource type
Conference Paper
Authors/contributors
Title
School Choice: Digital Prints and Network Analysis
Abstract
We apply social network analysis to examine school choice in the second-largest Russian city Saint-Petersburg. We use online data (“digital footprints”) of between-schools comparisons on a large school information resource shkola-spb.ru. This resource allows to identify clusters of city schools that have been compared to each other more often and thus reflect choice preferences of students and parents looking for a school. Network analysis is conducted in R (‘igraph’ package). For community detection, we employed fast-greedy clustering algorithm (Good et al. 2010). The resulting communities (school clusters) have been placed on a city map to identify territorial patterns formed according to choice preferences.Network analysis of the district school networks based on between-schools online comparisons reveals two main factors for community formation. The first factor is territorial proximity: users compare schools that are relatively close to each other and not separated by wide streets, parks, industrial areas, rivers, etc. The second grouping principle is the type of school: private schools always form a separate cluster which shows that they are not being compared with public schools. In one district there was also a cluster of elite or academically challenging public schools grouped together.
Date
2018
Proceedings Title
Digital Transformation and Global Society
Place
Cham
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Pages
417-426
Series
Communications in Computer and Information Science
Language
en
ISBN
978-3-030-02843-5
Short Title
School Choice
Library Catalogue
Springer Link
Citation
Ivaniushina, V., & Williams, E. (2018). School Choice: Digital Prints and Network Analysis. In D. A. Alexandrov, A. V. Boukhanovsky, A. V. Chugunov, Y. Kabanov, & O. Koltsova (Eds.), Digital Transformation and Global Society (pp. 417–426). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02843-5_33