High School Hookups: Awesome graph

So this article in Discover magazine shows connections between high school kids in the dating/hookup scene and how STD's have the possibility to travel through this network.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/map-high-school-hookups
Map High School Hookups


This is an awesome graph relating to a lot of things we've learned in class. For example, point 4 states that some people in the network have the power to stop the spread of an STD to a whole section simply by putting on a condom. This is a great example of a bridge. Also, notice the large amounts of triadic closure. I think this is funny: imagine the situation where Dave is constantly making fun of the kid who sits behind him in math class and thinks he's really weird. This graph suggests that Dave could be getting an STD from him.

I think that high school seems really cliquey, but in this example there seem to be a lot of people who are not just friendly with people of other cliques, but intimate enough to transmit a disease.

Do you guys think that this is an accurate portrayal of most high schools? Or your high school? Or are these kids just unusually promiscuous? Map High School Hookups

Laura Mueller wrote:
Do you guys think that this is an accurate portrayal of most high schools? Or your high school?

Well I went to a single sex Catholic high school, soooooooooo..... no

Hmmmm. I wonder if graphs like these are different for different size schools. I went to a really small public high school and grew up with the same ones since kindergarten and by the time you reached 9th grade anyone who hooked up with anyone was asking for drama. So a lot of people just hooked up with people from other schools. If you are talking about a graph like this is the context of one school, especially a small school, you would think the diameter would be small because the size of the network is small. Instead, because this is a real life example, there are other factors involved like drama, gossip, familiarity and bullying that deters people from actually having intimate contact with "new" people and potentially making the diameter bigger than it would be for a larger school.

Does that make sense?