Relational Resources: How Peer Support Helps Poor Teenagers Succeed

• In Event: 411 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 11. Networks and Inequality.

Abstract

Adolescence is a critical window in the life course, when teenagers face several turning points that can fundamentally influence their social trajectories. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with low-income teenagers in Cambridge conducted over three years, this paper shows how the peer group operated as an unlikely but important factor promoting adolescent success. Although viewed as a risk factor in much extant scholarship, the peer group provided multiple dimensions of support that helped meet teens’ basic needs, compensating for family and neighborhood disadvantage. Through flows of material, social and emotional goods, and by helping one another manage risk and crises, teens together navigated pathways through adolescence and to college, increasing their odds of escaping poverty. This adds to research about mechanisms for mobility among low-income young people.

Author

• Jasmin Sandelson, Harvard University