Towards a quantitative critical social network analysis (QuantCritSNA) approach on college student success and well-being. Relational trends from 2007-2023

Paris Wicker

This project expands preliminary research on the social support networks of Black and Indigenous students to advance a quantitative critical social network analysis (QuantCritSNA) methodology on how the evolving social networks of college students associate with student well-being, academic success, and sense of belonging. Analyzing 800,000 cross-sectional responses from the Healthy Minds Survey over a 16-year period, the first aim of this project is to map and typologize the evolution of help-seeking and social support networks of undergraduate college students in the United States between 2007-2023. Using social network analysis and multi-linear modeling, the second aim is to test associations of social network changes that influence group-level well-being, sense of belonging, and academic performance. As loneliness and shrinking social networks increase, relational frameworks that create equitable conditions for all students to thrive remains a top priority for colleges. Leveraging the predictive power of exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) and multi linear regression models, findings from the study will establish descriptive trends and associations on the underlying network pathways and structures that potentially shape traditional academic outcomes (such as GPA) and also liberatory or health-promoting outcomes (such as well-being and sense of belonging) over time.

About Paris Wicker

Paris Wicker is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her interdisciplinary research, informed by 15 years of experience in student affairs and college admissions, explores the conditions and consequences of success and well-being in higher education. Throughout her career, Paris's combination of counseling training, student affairs experiences, and research has been at the intersections of well-being, campus climate, social networks, and organizational change towards equity and justice. She offers a combination of mixed and multi-method research on the relational factors that shape educational experiences and health. Paris especially enjoys using interviews, surveys, and social network analysis, with guidance from Critical and Indigenous frameworks such as Critical Race Theory and Relationality. While the problems within education are not new, her research offers innovative methodological and practical implications into the full extent of inequity in higher education. Paris leads with a renewed moral imperative to broaden the purpose and outcome of higher education to include well-being as not only a means to other notions of success, such as degree attainment, but also a worthy goal in and of itself. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Ford Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation, and has been published in the Review of Higher Education, the Journal of College Student Development, and the Journal of Higher Education. Paris earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis with a doctoral minor in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin- Madison.