UROP Project

“Influence of mental health on accuracy of social network perception”

How reliable is the recall of social relationships? A symptom of many mental illnesses is the distorted perception of social relationships, which can jeopardize the maintenance of those very relationships. While the influence is well studied for the immediate social environment, it remains unclear to what extent the social structure of the extended social environment may also be perceived distortively. This study aims to investigate how mental health affects differences in perceptions of social relationships in the school context within a cohort of adolescents. We investigate the question using an in-school panel survey of eighth graders in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Using the Social Cognitive Mapping Approach, we assess each adolescent's individual perception of the social relationships among all other adolescents. We investigate how the perceptions differ depending on mental health and which role the centrality in the friendship network plays for the level of deviation from the

Task

- Literature research - Development of measure for overlap in network perception - Statistical analysis of secondary data

Requirements

Social science background, data analysis