Arrested Friendships? Justice Involvement and Interpersonal Exclusion among Rural Youth.

Objectives: We examine the impacts of adolescent arrest on friendship networks. In particular, we extend labeling theory by testing hypotheses for three potential mechanisms of interpersonal exclusion related to the stigma of arrest: rejection, withdrawal, and homophily. Method: We use longitudinal data on 48 peer networks from PROSPER, a study of rural youth followed through middle and high school. We test our hypotheses using stochastic actor-based models. Results: Our findings suggest that arrested youth are less likely to receive friendship ties from school peers, and are also less likely to extend them. Moreover, these negative associations are attenuated by higher levels of risky behaviors among peers, suggesting that results are driven by exclusion from normative rather than non-normative friendships. We find evidence of homophily on arrest but it appears to be driven by other selection mechanisms rather than a direct preference for similarity on arrest. Conclusions: Overall, our findings speak to how arrest may foster social exclusion in rural schools, thereby limiting social capital for already disadvantaged youth.

Moderators of Friend Selection and Influence in Relation to Adolescent Alcohol Use.

Friendships form an important context in which adolescents initiate and establish alcohol use patterns, but not all adolescents may be equally affected by this context. Therefore, this study tests whether parenting practices (i.e., parental discipline, parental knowledge, unsupervised time with peers) and individual beliefs (i.e., alcohol descriptive norms, positive social expectations, moral approval of alcohol use) moderate friend selection and influence around alcohol use. Stochastic actor-based models were used to analyze longitudinal social network and survey data from 12,335 adolescents (aged 11 to 17, 51.3% female) who were participating in the PROSPER project. A separate model was estimated for each moderating variable. Adolescents who reported consistent parental discipline, less unsupervised time with peers, higher descriptive alcohol use norms, and less positive social expectations about alcohol use were less likely to select alcohol-using friends. Those who reported consistent parental discipline, better parental knowledge, lower descriptive alcohol use norms, and less positive social expectations were more influenced by their friends' level of alcohol use. Thus, adolescents with these characteristics whose friends frequently use alcohol are at greater risk whereas those whose friends do not use alcohol are at lower risk of using alcohol. The findings show that, although selection and influence processes are connected, they may function in different ways for different groups of adolescents. For some adolescents, it is particularly important to prevent them from selecting alcohol-using friends, because they are more susceptible to influence from such friends. These peer network dynamics might explain how proximal outcomes targeted by many prevention programs (i.e., parenting practices and individual beliefs) translate into changes in alcohol use.

Social Ties Cut Both Ways: Self-Harm and Adolescent Peer Networks.

Peers play an important role in adolescence, a time when self-harm arises as a major health risk, but little is known about the social networks of adolescents who cut. Peer network positions can affect mental distress related to cutting or provide direct social motivations for self-harm. This study uses PROSPER survey data from U.S. high school students (n = 11,160, 48% male, grades 11 and 12), finding that social networks predict self-cutting net of demographics and depressive symptoms. In final models, bridging peers predicts higher self-cutting, while claiming more friends predicts lower cutting for boys. The findings suggest that researchers and practitioners should consider peer networks both a beneficial resource and source of risk associated with cutting for teens and recognize the sociostructural contexts of self-harm for adolescents more broadly.

New Students' Peer Integration and Exposure to Deviant Peers: Spurious Effects of School Moves?

School moves during adolescence predict lower peer integration and higher exposure to delinquent peers. Yet mobility and peer problems have several common correlates, so differences in movers' and non-movers' social adjustment may be due to selection rather than to causal effects of school moves. Drawing on survey and social network data from a sample of 7th and 8th graders, this study compared the structure and behavioral content of new students' friendship networks to those of not only non-movers, but also of students about to move schools; the latter should resemble new students in both observed and unobserved ways. The results suggest that the association between school moves and friends' delinquency is due to selection, but the association between school moves and peer integration may not be entirely due to selection.

Peer beliefs and smoking in adolescence: a longitudinal social network analysis.

BACKGROUND: Peer smoking is one of the strongest predictors of adolescent cigarette use, but less is known about whether other peer characteristics also contribute to this behavior. OBJECTIVES: This study examined the links between adolescent cigarette use and peer beliefs about smoking. It tested whether peer beliefs about smoking are associated with changes in cigarette use, whether this association is a result of changes in individual beliefs about smoking, and how beliefs inform friendship choices. METHODS: Analyses drew on data collected from 29 school-based networks, each measured at five occasions as students moved from 6th through 9th grade, as part of the study of the PROSPER partnership model. Longitudinal social network models provided estimates of friendship selection and behavior for an average of 6,200 students at each measurement point and more than 9,000 students overall. RESULTS: Peer beliefs about smoking influenced cigarette use both directly and through their impact on individual beliefs. Respondents tended to name friends whose beliefs about smoking were similar to their own, and the likelihood of being named as a friend was higher for those who reported more positive beliefs about smoking. CONCLUSION: The results from this study suggest that peer beliefs about smoking, in addition to peer cigarette use itself, are associated with adolescent smoking through several mechanisms. Because beliefs favorable to cigarette use are present before adolescents actually smoke, these results underscore the importance of implementing smoking prevention programs in early adolescence.

Social Networks and the Diffusion of Adolescent Problem Behavior: Reliable Estimates of Selection and Influence from Sixth Through Ninth Grades.

Seeking to reduce problematic peer influence is a prominent theme of programs to prevent adolescent problem behavior. To support the refinement of this aspect of prevention programming, we examined peer influence and selection processes for three problem behaviors (delinquency, alcohol use, and smoking). We assessed not only the overall strengths of these peer processes, but also their consistency versus variability across settings. We used dynamic stochastic actor-based models to analyze five waves of friendship network data across sixth through ninth grades for a large sample of U.S. adolescents. Our sample included two successive grade cohorts of youth in 26 school districts participating in the PROSPER study, yielding 51 longitudinal social networks based on respondents' friendship nominations. For all three self-reported antisocial behaviors, we found evidence of both peer influence and selection processes tied to antisocial behavior. There was little reliable variance in these processes across the networks, suggesting that the statistical imprecision of the peer influence and selection estimates in previous studies likely accounts for inconsistencies in results. Adolescent friendship networks play a strong role in shaping problem behavior, but problem behaviors also inform friendship choices. In addition to preferring friends with similar levels of problem behavior, adolescents tend to choose friends who engage in problem behaviors, thus creating broader diffusion.

Revisiting "What They Think": Adolescent Drinking and the Importance of Peer Beliefs.

The association between delinquent peers and delinquent behavior is among the most consistent findings in the criminological literature, and a number of recent studies have raised the standards for determining the nature and extent of peer influence. Despite these advances, however, key questions about how deviant behavior is socially transmitted remain unresolved. In particular, much of the research examining peer influence is limited to peer behavior, despite a rich literature supporting the salience of beliefs, such as expectations and moral approval, in shaping behaviors. The current study takes advantage of advances in the modeling of peer influence and selection processes to re-examine the contributions of peer beliefs and behaviors to adolescent drinking. I employ longitudinal social network analysis to examine how peers contribute to the complex interplay between deviant beliefs and behaviors. I find evidence that beliefs related to peer drinking have both a direct and indirect impact on behavior and also play an important role in the friendship selection process. These results highlight the importance of understanding how peers influence deviant behavior and suggest that peer beliefs are an important part of this relationship.

Similarity of friends versus nonfriends in adolescence: Developmental patterns and ecological influences.

This study examines developmental change across adolescence in the similarity of friends versus nonfriends. This differential in similarity is a key aspect of the organization of the peer context of development: The stronger the correlation between friends for an attribute, the more the attribute delineates clustering and divisions of friendships. We investigated change in the correlation between friends across 12 attributes covering demographics, orientations to key institutions (family, school, religion), and problem behavior, and we expected that the link between similarity and friendship would increase during adolescence for most attributes other than gender. We also predicted that the social ecological factors of school size and attribute variability would be associated with stronger correlations between friends and partially mediate developmental change. Data are from two grade cohorts of 27 small school districts, followed from sixth through 11th grades (N = 454 time-specific networks and over 65,000 person/waves of data; 84.2% White, 6.8% Hispanic/Latino, 3.2% African American, 1.3% Asian, .5% Native American, 3.9% other or multiple). The data analysis takes the form of a three-level random effects meta-analysis of network level correlations between friends (Moran's I). As expected, declining dominance of gender was offset by the emergence of moderate correlations across a broader profile of attributes. The ecological opportunity factors of grade cohort size and attribute variability significantly mediated these increases in correlations between friends, accounting for 23 to 73% of age-related change for 10 of the 11 attributes other than gender. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

WHEN ONSET MEETS DESISTANCE: COGNITIVE TRANSFORMATION AND ADOLESCENT MARIJUANA EXPERIMENTATION.

PURPOSE: Desistance scholars primarily focus on changing social roles, cognitive transformations, and shifting identities to understand the cessation of serious crime and illicit drug use in adulthood. In the current study, we move the spotlight away from adulthood and toward adolescence, the developmental stage when the prevalence of offending and substance use peak and desistance from most of these behaviors begins. Our primary hypothesis is that changes in perceived psychic rewards surrounding initial forays into marijuana use strongly predict adolescents' decisions to cease or persist that behavior. In addition, based on social learning expectations, we hypothesize that peer perceptions and behaviors provide mechanisms for perceptual change. METHODS: We test these hypotheses using longitudinal data of marijuana use, perceptions, and peer networks from the PROmoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience (PROSPER) study. We estimate hazard models of marijuana initiation and within-person models of perceptual updating for youth from grades 6 to 12 (n=6,154). RESULTS: We find that changes in marijuana's perceived psychic rewards surrounding initiation differentiated experimenters from persisters. Experimenters had significantly lower updated perceptions of marijuana as a fun behavior compared to persisters and these perceptions dropped after the initiation wave. In contrast, persisters updated their perceptions in upward directions and maintained more positive perceptions over time. Inconsistent with social learning expectations, initiators' updated perceptions of marijuana as a fun activity were not explained by peer-reported behaviors or attitudes.

Friends as a Bridge to Parental Influence: Implications for Adolescent Alcohol Use.

The current study investigates the possibility that friendship networks connect adolescents to influence from a broader group of adults beyond their own families. In doing so, we combine two rich traditions of research on adult influence on children and adolescents. Family research has suggested a number of ways in which effective parenting can reduce deviant behavior among adolescents. In addition, research on neighborhoods has advanced the idea that adults outside of the immediate family can exert social control that may reduce deviance. We employ longitudinal social network analysis to examine data drawn from the PROSPER Peers Project, a longitudinal study of adolescents following over 12,000 students in 27 non-metropolitan communities as they moved from 6th through 9th grade. We find evidence that the behavior of friends' parents is linked, both directly and indirectly, to adolescent alcohol use. Findings suggest that much of the influence from friends' parents is mediated through peer behavior, but that parental knowledge reported by friends continues to be associated with alcohol use even when controlling for competing mechanisms. Furthermore, adolescents tend to choose friends who report similar levels of parenting as themselves. Our results provide support for the position that friendships in adolescence connect youth to a broader network of adults and illustrate how adults outside of the family contribute to the social control of adolescents.

Effects of PROSPER on the influence potential of prosocial versus antisocial youth in adolescent friendship networks.

OBJECTIVES: We test the hypothesis that an evidence-based preventive intervention will change adolescent friendship networks to reduce the potential for peer influence toward antisocial behavior. Altering adolescents' friendship networks in this way is a promising avenue for achieving setting-level prevention benefits such as expanding the reach and durability of program effects. METHODS: Beginning in 2002, the Promoting School-University Partnerships to Enhance Resilience (PROSPER) randomized control trial assigned two entire sixth-grade cohorts of 14 rural and small town school districts in Iowa and Pennsylvania to receive the intervention and of 14 to control. A family-based intervention was offered in sixth grade and a school-based intervention was provided in seventh grade. More than 11,000 respondents provided five waves of data on friendship networks, attitudes, and behavior in sixth through ninth grade. Antisocial influence potential was measured by the association between network centrality and problem behavior for each of 256 networks (time, grade cohort, and school specific). RESULTS: The intervention had a beneficial impact on antisocial influence potential of adolescents' friendship networks, with p < .05 for both of the primary composite measures. CONCLUSIONS: Current evidence-based preventive interventions can alter adolescents' friendship networks in ways that reduce the potential for peer influence toward antisocial behavior.

Peers and the Emergence of Alcohol Use: Influence and Selection Processes in Adolescent Friendship Networks.

This study addresses not only influence and selection of friends as sources of similarity in alcohol use, but also peer processes leading drinkers to be chosen as friends more often than non-drinkers, which increases the number of adolescents subject to their influence. Analyses apply a stochastic actor-based model to friendship networks assessed five times from 6th through 9th grades for 50 grade cohort networks in Iowa and Pennsylvania, which include 13,214 individuals. Results show definite influence and selection for similarity in alcohol use, as well as reciprocal influences between drinking and frequently being chosen as a friend. These findings suggest that adolescents view alcohol use as an attractive, high status activity and that friendships expose adolescents to opportunities for drinking.