A new study that relies on data from Facebook finds students of African-American and mixed-race heritage are the most likely to have ethnically diverse social groups.

Researchers at Harvard University gained permission to study the Facebook habits of an entire class at a U.S. university -- without the students being made aware they were under surveillance, said Jason Kaufman, a professor at Harvard and one of the lead researchers.

With more than 50 million people using the popular social networking site, it offered a huge sample group and provided some fascinating results, Kaufman told CTV's Canada AM on Monday.

"We're still in the process of collecting and analyzing data but we did find interesting trends," he said.

"For example, we found that African-American students and students of mixed race have the most racially heterogeneous networks -- friends with the most people of colours other than their own."

And in many cases, the study found, people of African-American or mixed-race served as "brokers" between different groups that would otherwise have no connection to each other.

The study is ongoing, and researchers hope to gain new insight into social patterns among students across racial and ethnic boundaries.

They are primarily hoping to learn, definitively, whether African American students are more likely to have friends of their own race, and how much racial diversity exists among the networks of white and Asian students.

They are also probing whether it is "true that people who have the same taste in music or movies are more likely to be friends, taking other things into consideration, than people who have very different tastes," Kaufman said.

The Facebook data is valuable and unique, he said, because the information is submitted voluntarily by users building their own personal online profiles, rather than through a survey. That makes the survey a "very natural, organic way of peering into social life," he said.

"When you're being called on the telephone or handed a form, it shapes or constricts the way you respond and you also have time limitations," Kaufman said.

"The beauty of Facebook and comparable sites is that people are in general rating this information on their own in their own time, putting what they would like to have on there."

The Harvard researchers will be releasing their results as the study progresses.