Gabor Kertesi

The project will examine friendship networks among students in Hungarian primary schools, focusing on the ethnic dimension of these networks. The analysis will draw on a recent survey with data on friends, ethnicity, family background and outcomes. The dataset contains information on four thousand 8th-grade students from 88 schools in 74 of the larger municipalities in Hungary. The municipalities in the sample are the largest Hungarian cities and towns with a sizeable Roma minority (except for Budapest). The selected schools have Roma representation between 10 and 90 percent. Each student completed an in-class questionnaire about friends, grades and family background. The friendship questions were comparable to those in the AddHealth survey from the U.S.. The individual survey information was linked to student records containing test scores and additional information on grades and family background. Information on where students are studying two years after the survey is part of the dataset.