Studying school communities as multiplex dynamic networks: The “RECENS Wired into Each Other” Dataset, 2010–2013

This article provides an overview of the “Research Center for Educational and Network Studies (RECENS) Wired into each other” longitudinal social network study conducted in 44 secondary-school classrooms in Hungary between 2010 and 2013. Participants were asked to fill out paper-based surveys four times over a 3-year period (n = 1,767 students). These surveys explored peer relations and perceptions within each classroom in over 30 distinct network dimensions, including shared social activities, ties of affection, bullying and victimization, perceptions about peers’ traits (including their ethnicity), behaviors, social roles, and status. Alongside the network data, we collected information about students’ individual background (e.g., sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status) and behaviors (e.g., smoking, studying habits). We further interviewed the main teacher of each classroom to gather data about teaching arrangements and teacher perceptions of students. The current article aims to provide context for the dataset and documentation available online (Vörös et al., 2022). The dataset has been used in several published research articles, and PhD and MA theses in recent years. However, we believe that its publication is still highly relevant, as various measures in the rich dataset remain unexplored to date. After describing the study and available data, we review the main topics the study team and our colleagues have explored in recent years. We then outline a few promising directions for further inquiry into the data, which could all leverage the unique multiplex information gathered in the surveyed communities.