A 12-week longitudinal study of the development of social support networks among college freshmen is presented. Eighty-nine male and female students who lived either in university residence halls or at home with their parents completed a series of questionnaires in which they described their social networks while attending college and their adaptation to university life. In accord with an ecological view of social support, the structural and functional characteristics of the freshmen's networks were found to vary with the focal individual's gender, living situation, and the temporal stage of the network. Further, network characteristics were significantly associated with the freshmen's successful adaptation to college, though the relative adaptiveness of particular network characteristics varied over time.

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This article describes a study of a school community established within a larger high school as part of a district-wide effort to organize high schools into collections of smaller learning communities. The author presents an ecological framework of school communities that specifies their features across multiple dimensions and levels of schooling. The framework provides a scheme for bringing the entire organization into line with the concept of school communities and a guide for describing and assessing their functioning. Student- and teacher-survey measures were assembled and administered to gauge school community processes and goals specified in the framework. The findings indicated that students in the school community perceived their school environment and instruction in a manner more consistent with the framework than students in either the unrestructured school or magnet programs. School community teachers' relations with colleagues and students were also more consistent with the framework than other teachers 'relations.

There is a growing recognition of the need to understand not only how social support functions in relation to characteristics of the individual, but also how it may relate to aspects of the communities in which it arises. The present study identified population size as a potentially important community variable vis-i~-vis social support. Urbanization theory was used to generate hypotheses about relationships among community size, mediators, and two social support variables: social network size and the average social support provided by network members. In a telephone survey of four communities of varying sizes, respondents answered questions about the social support provided by their network members, relations with neighbors, and the extent of their social participation. The path analysis results suggested that larger communities are associated with lower average social support and a pattern of social interaction which limits social participation and, in turn, network size.Research on social support has thus far been primarily devoted to investigations of its stress-buffering effects and its role in enhancing the adjustment of individuals. The positive effects of socially supportive relationships have been largely confirmed in studies of a variety of groups including general community samples (Henderson, Byrne, Duncan-~The authors are indebted to Franklin J. Boster, Arizona State University, for his expertise in path analysis. This paper is based on a thesis submitted by the first author in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the master's degree.

A transactional approach to research was illustrated through an analysis of social networks on a street. Patterns of interrelationships among multiple dimensions of networks were identified in summer and at Christmas. The assessment revealed relative continuity in social relationships, but change in the way in which social, affective, and environmental aspects of behavior were linked at the two times. The socially and psychologically bonded networks did not exhibit more home upkeep/landscaping in summer, but did decorate their homes more extensively at Christmas, supporting the view that the relationship/attachment/environmental aspects would fit together differently at the two times. The study suggests that neighborhood networks can be fruitfully understood as dynamic, multifaceted unities and that a transactional strategy can be a useful part of a total research program.