Who Lifts Me Up (and Brings Me Down)? The Influence of Same- and Cross-Race Friends on Academic Achievement in Middle School

• In Event: 2-180 - Links Between Ethnic-Racial Identity, Intergroup Relations, & Academic Adjustment: Explanations From Social Network Perspectives

Integrative Statement

Friends matter during adolescence, perhaps more than any other period in the life course. Within the friendship literature, studies have documented the impact of friends on adolescents’ academic achievement (e.g., Gremmen et al., 2017; Flashman, 2012). Adolescents gravitate toward friends similar to them in terms of achievement (selection effects) and become more similar in achievement to friends over time (influence effects). Less studied are characteristics of friends who, once selected, are particularly influential. For example, considering the growing ethnic diversity of public schools, are the most influential friends the same or different ethnicity? And do friendship influence processes vary for ethnic groups who fall at different points along the achievement continuum? African American and Latino youth may not be in a position to benefit from the influence of high-achieving same ethnic friends to the same extent as White and Asian youth who, on average, do better in school. In the present study, we used social network analysis to address questions about ethnicity and achievement that have yet to be examined.

Participants were 352 sixth grade students (50% male) at an ethnically diverse middle school in Southern California. The racial/ethnic composition of the sample was 17% African American/Black, 8% East/Southeast Asian, 34% Mexican American/Latino, 13% White, 8% Other, and 20% Biracial/Multiethnic. Students participated in a nomination procedure in which they recorded the names of their good friends in the same grade. Teachers rated students’ academic engagement (e.g., pays attention in class) and grades were obtained from the school at the end of the school year.

We used a network autocorrelation model to examine the influence of friends’ academic achievement (GPA) on students’ own achievement, controlling for their academic engagement. The model operates like a linear regression with an additional network term—the peer influence effect—that accounts for the association between connected members of the network (friends) on the same variable of interest (GPA).

To examine which friends were most influential on students’ academic achievement, the peer influence effect was divided into the effect for specific students (e.g., Asian, African American) and by friendship type (same- or cross-race). The peer influence effect was only significant for African American and Latino youth (whose GPA was lower than Asian and White youth). For Latino youth, the peer influence effect was similar for same- and cross-race friends (ρ=.13, p<.05; ρ=.16, p<.05, respectively). For African American youth, the peer influence effect was much stronger for same-race (ρ=.38, p<.001) compared to cross-race (ρ=.20, p<.05) friends (see Table1).

Since a significant peer influence effect means there is a positive association between outcomes of youth and their friends, having high-achieving friends would result in high achievement oneself while having low-achieving friends would result in low achievement. For African American youth, in particular, having high-achieving same-race friends may be especially important for their academic success.

Subsequent analyses will explore the role of racial and ethnic identity along with exposure to same- and different-race friends throughout the school day on the peer influence effect of same- and cross-race friends.

Authors

• Leslie Echols, Missouri State University
  Presenting Author

• Sandra Graham, University of California, Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Author