The Importance of Social Networks: An Interview with Dr. Annika Fjelkner Pihl

As mentioned in our previous article, social networks and social influences greatly matter for students in higher education. To learn more about this, I sat down with Annika Fjelkner Pihl and talked to her about her doctoral research on students and their social networks.

Annika is a senior lecturer in the Business program and Educational Developer at the Center for Higher Education Development at Kristianstad University (HKR), Sweden. Her teaching mainly focuses on the development of academic skills and academic writing, and her research interests focus on how student social networks and relational competencies are related to engagement, ?which leads to both social and academic success in higher education.

So, let’s see what she thought about students and their friend choices.

In A Spark: How did you get into research about student networks and connections?

Annika: Well, first of all, I teach a lot and I've taught classes all the way up from kindergarten to university level. And it has always struck me that I can only affect a person so much as an instructor. The person him- or herself have to decided to do something but also the friends around them and the networks they have are more influential and have greater impact on what the student does or doesn’t do, than I. So, I just realized that there is such a strength in the relationships in the classroom that can really provide this energy to push someone forward, but it can also pull a student away from what is supposed to be done or achieved in the classroom. It just fascinated me every year to see this at every grade. One important aspect at the university level was the great divide between my relationship with students and their relationship with peers, and how strong that force is.

One of the triggering things for me though is probably that there is a great division between students with immigrant background and the native Swedish students. As I say in the my book though, commuters and non-campus students. And I was thinking about why- why can't we bridge that? And if it things worked out, you don't have to be best friends. That's not the point. And you don't have to be socializing outside of the classroom either. But we need to be able to speak to each other in the classroom. I need to, as the teacher, I have to work with those connections. We hope to at least have weak ties, like when you can say hello to everyone. That is important. And I think that at the university level we often forget about the social aspects. And so that's, that's basically what started all of my work, between that and my fascination to see those clusters in the classroom the first semester and how strong they were, and how that could either pull the student through or hold him or her back or even pull them out of a rough period. Time and again this happens and it is fascinating, crazy fascinating.

In A Spark: What commonalities or trends did you see across your work? You worked on this for several years and wrote many papers on the topic. Are there certain commonalities across the studies?

Annika:

In A Spark: My next question is about your paper from 2021- Building Study-Related Relationships. You said that it’s important to provide students with opportunities to expand their relationships so that rich links, and multiplex relationships grow in number. How would you suggest that the students and the institution provide these opportunities to create these multiplex networks?

Annika: I think that it's really, really important, especially during the first semester, to put the students in situations where they need to interact with as many other students as possible. And maybe not be locked into one working group the entire semester. But rather doing a lot of shorter more low-stakes group work that are really clearly scaffolded, things like a check-in or a presentation of yourself so that they really get to know each other because in a class of 200 students, it’s very difficult so we should find ways to divide into smaller units. And we can mix students in various ways. Important too is not to always work with new people because if I've been put in a group with you twice, and I know that you're Sarah and you were approachable, I’m going to feel more comfortable with you and the new people working on the new project. This happens too when students come in to lecture and don’t know where to sit, but if they see someone they know they will probably go and sit with them. I think that is really important. Then, of course, you can always put students into longer project groups to work on high-stakes assignments. During that period, I would say to still do small-group activities so that they can give feedback to others, hear new ideas, and have a larger base of names and faces to choose from, because that is where you find the connections if their own group doesn’t work out. What I saw was that students felt stuck in their assigned groups and would work together the entire three years of their degree and they didn’t develop a larger pool of friends or try to branch out. So as the instructor, if you mix them sometimes then they have more opportunity to see each other and see if they have things in common with other classmates. This is important especially if you have a lot of students who live off-campus and they only have peer contact in the classroom.

In A Spark: That's a really good point, and my next question refers to those commuter students. Because in your paper in 2022- “Ok- I need help from somewhere”: ‘The educational value of multiplex student relationships in a commuter college’- you wrote about commuter students and their challenges, as we've mentioned before, in creating friends and those relationships. While you were working on your research, did you hear about or find ways that these students could create friendship networks?

Annika: Yes, we did realize that they did create networks but like with the mature students, they don’t need the large friendship groups that much because they have a social network elsewhere. However, they do need to create that close friend or two, or two or three people in school that you feel safe working with, that you feel safe hanging out with, which doesn't necessarily mean that you hang out socially on the weekends. That's why I ended up calling it semi-professional networks because it is a bit like in the workplace. Two or three people that you like and you hang out with at work but I don't meet these guys outside of the office. We talk about students as if they're friends and they go for beers all the time and they’re going to be pals forever, but that's simply not true. And we know that, but we still talk about them as if that were true.

In A Spark: For all of the students, domestic and international, what role can clubs and organizations on campus play in helping them create the very important social relationships needed to get through school?

Annika:

And so, whether a student who lives on-campus or is a commuter, everyone benefits from having social networks, no matter how small those might be. And as Annika points out, in our Canadian context and structure of higher education, clubs and social communities are more typically the place where students will find and build those connections. What is your campus doing to support social network growth among students?

Thank you very much to Annika for sharing her thoughts and expertise on the topic of student social networks. I look forward to reading more of your work in the coming years!

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Leo Quote: “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one!” -C.S. Lewis

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References

Fjelkner-Pihl, A. (2021). Building Study-Related Relationships. Doctoral Dissertation; Sweden: Lund University.

Fjelkner-Pihl, A. (2022). “Ok- I need help from somewhere”: ‘The educational value of multiplex student relationships in a commuter college’. Innovative Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-022-09611-y