Developmental Change in Friendship and Delinquency Across Adolescence

• In Event: New Developments on the Impact of Peers in the Life Course

Abstract

Adolescence is not only a time of dramatic change in delinquency, but also in peer relations. Youth enter middle school as children whose activities are closely supervised by adults. By the end of high school, they will be fully-grown and spend many hours at a time with peers away from supervision, often far from home. We take advantage of the newly expanded age range of the PROSPER Peers study, now covering sixth through twelfth grades, in order to document change across adolescence in peer relations relevant to delinquency. We will examine year-to-year change both for some key features of friendship ties (e.g., number of friends named, variance in popularity, amount of unstructured time with friends) and for connections between friendships and delinquency (e.g., friends' mean delinquency in comparison to mean individual deviance, variance of friends' delinquency, similarity between friends for delinquency). The PROSPER Peers study is an especially valuable source for this fundamental descriptive information because it includes full grade cohort social network data covering 9,000 – 11,000 respondents for each of 8 waves of data collection from students in two grade cohorts of 27 non-metropolitan school districts in Iowa and Pennsylvania.

Authors

• D. Wayne Osgood, Pennsylvania State University

• Sonja Siennick, Florida State University

• Daniel T. Ragan, Pennsylvania State University