Close Friends, Popular Peers, Team formation and Leadership in Group Projects

Abstract: The paper discusses diverse interconnected relationships formed within a seemingly unrelated group of students and a conceptually different problem statement. This study uses a Social Network Analysis (SNA) to analyze and map the connections among the individuals. SNA facilitates understanding the psychology of a group of people while performing a certain task. This could help predict further patterns in which a similar group might perform these tasks. As discussed in this paper, the analysis of selection of teammates for a project indirectly implies friendships in a department and can predict new friendships that could result from these. The data collected can be represented as a Social Network using various analysis tools such as Gephi and NodeXL. The result of the analysis determines the popular peer among the students and elucidates the reason behind it. Also, various other Inferences such as the close friends list, Social Influence of a node, and more were deduced.