Do personal relationships boost academic performance more for women than for men?

Abstract

Social integration is known to be positively related to academic performance. It is also well-known to play a different role for (self-identified) men and women. In this paper, we examine the differences seen in the correlations between academic performance and social integration for men and women. Gender was determined on the basis of self-identification. Utilizing the data from the Russian representative panel of late adolescents (N = 4,400), we demonstrate a positive relationship between the core discussion network size as a measure of social integration. Using moderation analysis, we demonstrate that the role of social integration for women is more pronounced than for men. Our findings show the importance of social integration and support for girls and women and suggest possible policy implications.

Keywords

Core discussion network social network academic performance gender networks women personal relationships

Academic performance is one of the key determinants of professional and occupational success (Roth & Clarke, 1998). It is associated with multiple factors (Mushtaq & Khan, 2012), including personal relationships. Individuals with a higher number of social contacts within the classroom—having many friends among classmates, for instance, which may indicate a high level of social integration—tend to be more successful than students who do not create and maintain relationships with their peers. Empirical studies document the positive association between social integration and academic performance in student networks (Dokuka et al., 2020; Mishra, 2020; Thiele et al., 2018; Vaquero & Cebrian, 2013; Vargas et al., 2018). This association was found for social ties of different types, including friendship, mentorship, collaboration, and online communication. Stadtfeld et al. (2019, p. 795) concluded that “even seemingly non-instrumental social relations like positive interaction and friendship can be beneficial, as they naturally evolve into collaboration ties”.

Personal relationship formation is also known to be linked to gender. According to previous studies, women typically form larger networks than men (Albert et al., 2021; Benenson, 1990; Blommaert et al., 2020; Mishra, 2020). However, it is not known whether gender moderates the association between personal network size and academic performance; that important information could help suggest more individualized interventions to improve student academic performance. This paper contributes to a broad literature that discusses gender as a possible mediator or moderator between individual characteristics, including academic performance and patterns in forming social relationships (Chidambaram et al., 2023; Georgiadou & Syed, 2021; Kim et al., 2020). Specifically, the studies just mentioned agree that gender may explain human behaviors in different life spheres, however, the range of these spheres remains unspecified. Therefore, when we plan social policy programs, we cannot be certain of the social spheres in which it is important to treat people differently according to gender. In this paper, we analyze gender as a possible moderator in the educational sphere, examining how it might affect the relationship between academic performance and integration through close social relationships. We measure social integration as the size of the personal core discussion network (CDN), which is a group of people an individual has contacted during the past six months when faced with important matters to discuss (Small et al., 2015). We hypothesize that gender may moderate the association between CDN and academic outcomes.

Data and Methods

We utilized data from the Russian Longitudinal Panel Study of Educational and Occupational Trajectories (TrEC) (Malik, 2019), which tracked 4,400 students who participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (OECD, 2013) in 2012. The TrEC is a nationally representative sample for one age cohort: individuals who were 15 years old in 2012. We examined the relationship between the CDN size and academic performance using correlation and multiple regression analyses with interaction (moderator) variables. Tables presenting information about the variables and sample are presented in the Appendix (Tables 1 and 4).

Gender was measured on the basis of self-identification. The choice of binary gender analysis was linked to the gender ideology that is present in Russia. The proportion of women in the sample was 54%.

The family socio-economic status in TrEC was measured by several indicators: 1) the level of parental education (i.e., did or did not attain higher education); 2) the average monthly family income (in rubles); and 3) the number of books at home.

Core Discussion Network (CDN)

The information about CDNs was collected in 2015 when the respondents were 18 years old. CDN studies typically ask respondents to name people with whom they discussed important matters within the last six months and subsequently to interpret relationships between the pairs of the names alters (Burt et al., 1985). Respondents may include any person in their CDN, ranging from family members and close friends to doctors and lawyers (these pairs exemplify the so-called kin and non-kin partners). The goal of this question is “to elicit reasonably strong ties” (Mardsen, 1987). The CDN is theorized to be a major source of support throughout a person’s life (Fischer, 1982; Marsden, 1987; Small et al., 2015). A principal advantage of this question about a person’s CDN is that it is short enough to be included in large population-based studies. Thus, the CDN approach is one of the possible ways to identify the level of global social integration.

In our study, the data about CDNs were collected using the following question: “Do you now have someone with whom you could talk about personal matters, and if yes, how many such people?”. This question allowed us to understand the CDN’s size but did not convey CDN properties such as density or the relative proportions of kin and non-kin CDN members.

Academic Performance

We compared the extent to which different types of academic performance measurements could be associated with CDN size. Three measures of academic performance were investigated at once for triangulation purposes. Academic performance was defined based on the following three measures: 1) PISA reading scores (collected in 2012), 2) self-reported results of the unified state examination (USE) (collected in 2015), and 3) self-reports of university academic grades over the past year (collected in 2015). All these three academic performance measures may be regarded as examinations with different stakes (Jackson et al., 2020), that is, different consequences for the test-taker. High-stakes examinations are associated with important transitions (e.g., the USE has the highest stake because it is a primary selection mechanism for attending university). Examinations with low stakes (e.g., university grades) have moderate consequences. Tests with no stakes (e.g., PISA) do not affect individuals at all.

PISA defines reading literacy as “understanding, using, reflecting on and engaging with written texts to achieve one’s goals, to develop one’s knowledge and potential, and to participate in society; ” it considers reading skills a foundation for achievement in other academic subjects, as well as a prerequisite for successful participation in most areas of adult life (OECD, 2014).

USE is a standardized examination on a range of subjects. This examination is uniform and intended for all graduates of Russian schools. Since 2009, all Russian universities have been obliged to admit students on the basis of USE results (Prakhov & Yudkevich, 2019). As the national language, Russian is an obligatory subject, as is mathematics. Requirements for other subjects vary across universities according to their specializations. For TrEC, information about respondents’ USE scores was collected based on their self-reports. In this paper, we used a student’s mean score in Russian and mathematics as a measure of academic performance.

Respondents were asked to evaluate their performance over the last academic year on a scale from 1 to 5 (see SI for details). We used that evaluation as a proxy measure of university performance over the past year.

Results

CDN Description

The mean CDN size is 2.58 (SD = 2.60); the median is 2; and the mode is 3 (Table 1, Appendix). The mean sizes of the CDN for men and women are close (x_women = 2.54 and x_men = 2.59), although the standard deviation of the CDN for men is slightly higher (SD_women = 2.03 and SD_men = 2.88). For men, the CDN size ranges from 0 to 45, whereas for women it ranges from 0 to 30. There is no statistically significant difference between the sizes of men’s and women’s CDNs (t-test, p = .7). Each sixth respondent (17.1%) indicates that she/he does not discuss personal matters with anyone. Almost half of the respondents discuss personal matters with two to three individuals. A small fraction of participants reported a CDN size larger than five (5.7%). Overall, this distribution of the CDN size resembles the findings of earlier research, suggesting that for most individuals, there are a few people who constitute the core of that individual’s personal network (Mardsen, 1987, McPherson et al., 2006). The CDN distributions for men and women differ. Whereas more than a fifth of men (21.3%) do not discuss important matters with others, only 13.1% of women are socially isolated. Additionally, men are more likely than women to report having five or more people with whom they discuss personal matters (15.8% for men and 11.9% for women).

A person’s CDN size is not related to their family size (Pearson’s r = −.02, p = .30). It is positively associated with the respondent’s socio-economic status (Pearson’s r = .08, p < 10⁻⁵), but has no relationship to the amount of financial support they receive from the family (Pearson’s r = −.02, p = .22). The positive association between socio-economic status and CDN size was already established by research on a population sample (Mardsen, 1987), and we confirm this relationship.

Association Between the CDN Size and Academic Performance

To understand the association between the CDN size and academic performance, we used three measures of academic performance: PISA, self-reported USE scores in Russian and mathematics, and self-reported university grades during the last academic year.

Table 2 (see the Appendix) summarizes the correlations between different performance measurements and CDN size. We found a positive relationship between the CDN size and the PISA scores and university performance for the entire sample (p < .05). The association between the mean USE score and CDN size is positive but on the borderline of statistical significance (p = .05).

Further, we examined the relationship between CDN size, gender, and academic performance using multiple regression with moderation variables (Dawson, 2014). In this analysis, we focused on PISA alone since for these data, we have greater reliability; unlike the USE scores, PISA scores are not self-reported by respondents. The regression model equation we used to explore this relationship and its results are given in the Appendix (Table 3).

The model shows that women have higher values for academic performance than men. On average, women’s academic scores are 29.2 points higher than men’s. For women, the CDN size is positively related to performance. An increase of one person in the CDN is associated with a performance increase of 1.8 points. The interaction term between gender and CDN for women is also positive and statistically significant, which supports our hypothesis about the greater role of the CDN in women’s academic performance. The value of this interaction is 3.1, which implies that an increase of one person in the CDN for women is associated with an additional performance increase of 3.1 points. In summary, an increase of one person in the CDN for men is associated with a 1.8-point increase in performance, whereas for women it is associated with a 4.9 (1.8 + 3.1) point increase. This demonstrates that the CDN plays a more important role in women’s academic performance. Socio-economic status has no statistically significant effect on performance.

Discussion and Policy Implications

In this paper, we confirmed our hypothesis, revealing that strong social network ties may differently impact self-identified men’s and women’s academic performance. Using a multiple regression analysis with interaction between gender and CDN size, we demonstrated that the CDN plays a greater role in academic performance for women than for men. This phenomenon has several possible explanations.

Potential Explanations of the Findings

First, as outlined above, strong social ties might play distinct roles for men and women. These results, which align with other findings from the network literature, indicate that men and women manage their social networks differently (Igarashi et al., 2005; Palchykov et al., 2012; Szell & Thurner, 2013; Van Emmerik, 2006). Thus, we may expect that men and women use their networks for divergent purposes and functions.

Second, our results might also indicate that men receive the support they need for their studies directly from the academic environment (e.g., from classmates and professors), whereas women do not have sufficient social resources from this community and must seek other options. For example, girls tend to have more negative attitudes than boys toward mathematics, including gender stereotypes, anxieties, and self-concepts (Gunderson et al., 2012), and these attitudes might be received from teachers. Thus, a support network of strong ties serves as a buffer against such negative social influences. Additionally, we also found that social integration may have a different impact on examinations according to whether the stakes are high, medium, or low. The literature on social networks usually examines the grade-point average as an indicator of academic performance, however, these outcomes may be measured in multiple ways. We suggest that further studies should consider the impact of social relationships on examinations with different stakes.

Taking a broader perspective on the literature about gender as a mediator between individual traits and personal relationship formation, our results highlight that a woman’s academic success depends on social support, and this effect may extend far beyond education, reaching into the professional sphere, or political participation, for example. Future studies should examine whether the CDN parameters are linked to a woman’s success in other spheres in the same manner as in education and whether in some fields, the CDN network size is just as important for men as for women or, perhaps, even more so. This seems possible in female-dominated professional environments such as hairdressing or makeup artistry, especially in societies with strong traditional values that stigmatize male engagement in artistic industries (Froehlich et al., 2020). Furthermore, our study investigated gender without other possible axes of inequality (Dill & Zambrana, 2020). Thus, it did not consider ethnicity, sexual identity, migrant status, and many others that could be fruitfully included as variables in a future analysis.

Policy Implications

This study’s findings about personal relationships and gender as a mediator of academic performance in university students have several policy implications. First, university administrations might promote opportunities for social and mental health support that are specific to women’s well-being, advertising them on official websites and in public communication to ensure their availability to everyone. Social support activities could include clubs or contests for women. Mental health support could be designed to include digital applications supporting women’s mental health. Female university students could have services available on a day-to-day basis or through centers offering free group or individual consultations with counselors who specialize in women’s mental health and social skills (Fox Tree & Vaid, 2022; Pasque & Nicholson, 2023). These services could be especially useful for women in male-dominated areas such as science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) because they could help prevent women’s attrition from those fields, eventually helping to increase the proportion of women (Casad et al., 2021).

Limitations

Our study is not without limitations, which could be addressed in future research. The major limitation is that we used the modified question about the CDN, which did not allow us to collect information about the CDN’s internal structure (such as the CDN’s density and its relative proportions of kin and non-kin members). Further empirical research should harvest detailed information about the CDN’s size and structure. Additionally, our findings do not establish causality, only correlations. While we could not simultaneously collect data about academic performance and the CDN, future studies should be organized to collect those data simultaneously.

Another limitation is that we examined gender as a binary variable. Gender is a social construct, and since more genders are now recognized, future studies might formulate questions about the CDN using parameters that recognize that variety (Bakker et al., 2022). Had we examined more types of gender identity, we might have found subgroups within the identifications as women or men; for example, we might have found self-identified women who do not demonstrate a relationship between gender and academic performance.

Finally, our analyses were conducted among a representative sample of young Russian adults. Further research is needed to understand the generalizability of our findings among other populations. For example, although we did not examine which women benefit more from a large CDN, we may expect that the effect of a support network may vary for women with diverse socio-economic status, sexual orientation, family background, or other variables. Thus, further research is required to identify the role of the CDN and strong social ties in academic performance and other important outcomes for various groups of women.

Conclusion

In this paper, we investigated the relationship between the CDN size and academic performance in a nationally representative sample for one age cohort. We conclude that individual academic performance is positively associated with the CDN size and this association is gender-specific. These results are robust after controls. Our findings suggest that the impact of close social relationships on individual outcomes may differ for men and women. We also highlight that integration in close relationships is important for academic performance, although social integration was primarily considered at the classroom level.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Do personal relationships Boost academic performance more for women than for men?

Supplemental Material for Do personal relationships Boost academic performance more for women than for men? by Sofia Dokuka and Oxana Mikhaylova in Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Strategic Project “Success and Self-Sustainability of the Individual in a Changing World” which is part of Higher School of Economics’ development program under the “Priority 2030” academic leadership initiative. The “Priority 2030” initiative is run by Russia’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education as part of National Project “Science and Universities”.

Open research statement

As part of IARR’s encouragement of open research practices, the author(s) have provided the following information: This research was not pre-registered. The data used in the research cannot be publicly shared but are available upon request from the corresponding author: oxanamikhailova@gmail.com.

ORCID iD

Oxana Mikhaylova

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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