High School Daisy Chain

No, that's not a macro shot of a snow flake.

It's an illustration of how a team of sociologists view the romantic and sexual relations of a thousand students in an American high school. Over the course of eighteen months, researchers traced the entanglements of "Jefferson High School," an almost-white public high school in the midwest.

The pattern that emerged was different from what the researchers thought it would look like:

“Many of the students only had one partner. They certainly weren’t being promiscuous. But they couldn’t see all the way down the chain.”

The surprising thing about the network at Jefferson High was the near absence of cycling –- situations in which people have relationships with others close to them on the network, Moody said.

The lack of cycling seems traceable to rules that adolescents have about who they will not date. The teens will not date (from a female perspective) one’s old boyfriend’s current girlfriend’s old boyfriend. This would be considered taking “seconds” in a relationship.

I wonder how this would work in the Philippine context, where people are suffocated by their less than six degrees of entanglements.