The author examines friendships between students from different socioeconomic groups, investigating the factors that make these relationships more likely and comparing these relationships with those between students from different races, which have been studied more extensively. Consistent with previous research, the results reveal that student homogeneity is positively related to social interaction in schools but that these relationships are not always straightforward with regard to socioeconomic status. Students' experiences in socioeconomically diverse environments depend on their relative positions within the distribution, even when holding the percentage of same-socioeconomic status peers constant. Although few factors are associated with more diverse friendship preferences-save potentially participation in the arts-factors that increase the overall likelihood of friendship tie formation predict higher numbers of intergroup friends. This general friendship promotion can be seen as an important avenue for both improving students' academic experience and promoting diversity in social interaction.

Previous accounts of social performance have examined the difficulties associated with multiple audiences, but few describe situations in which a performer’s audiences are not only multiple but are also connected in ways that mean the reaction of one audience will influence that of the other. I lay out the necessary conditions for audiences to be considered connected, the potential configurations of connected audiences, and the challenges for performative success that come with such configurations. I argue that some performance structures are increasingly central to civil engagement as groups become less likely to interact but more likely to virtually observe one another and that conceptualizing these performances is essential to understanding recent political events in pluralistic societies.

This study examines the widely held belief that socially central individuals are disproportionately influential in their networks. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, it models the association between four behavioral outcomes and two distinct specifications of the behaviors' relationship to network prominence. This study finds little evidence that sociometrically central individuals are more influential than randomly chosen peers from the same network when predicting drinking, smoking, and sports participation. Students resemble their peers in systematic ways, but it is unlikely that this is because central students serve as a reference for the group or because students adjust their actions based on the social rewards that they observe given their position in a social network.