The Co-Evolution of Friendship and Activity Contexts and their Consequences for Ethnoracial Segregation

• In Event: Innovations in Social Network Methods for Examining the Role of Peer Processes in Youth Development

Abstract

Adolescence is a critical point in the life course when one’s identity and beliefs surrounding ethnoracial groups become especially salient (Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014). Concurrently, as youth attention shifts away from family, school and peer contexts take on added import in shaping development (Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 2006). However, the social contexts that can offer exposure to diverse peers and reduce prejudice are themselves endogenous – a product of adolescents’ choices about how to spend their time and with whom. This leads us to ask: How do youth and their social contexts influence one another and what is the role of race in these processes? In addressing these questions, we focus on two widespread contexts: friendships and extracurricular activities (ECAs).

Our first question is how friendships among activity co-participants arise. Activities are a developmental context that support friendship, though the direction of this association isn’t always clear. One perspective is that ECAs are foci of activity and, as such, stimulate friendships (Feld 1981; Schaefer et al. 2011). However, friends also influence one another’s ECA participation, as evidenced by joining the same activities (Fujimoto et al., 2018). Thus, we ask: (1) how strongly does friendship affect activity co-participation and (2) how strongly does ECA co-participation affect friendship?

Second, we ask what role race/ethnicity plays in the co-evolution of friendship networks and ECA participation. One explanation is that adolescents join activities with racially similar friends (e.g., Feld, 1982). Another explanation is that students seek activities with higher rates of co-ethnics, which may be attributable to aspects of identity (Rivas-Drake et al., 2018). Alternatively, intergroup contact theory predicts that more opportunities will lead to more cross-group friendships if the right conditions are met (Allport, 1957), suggesting that ethnoracial heterogeneity within ECAs may have an overall positive effect on intergroup friendships (Schaefer et al., 2018). In light of this, we test several ways that race shapes the activities that students join.

We leverage data from the Teen Identity Development and Education Study (TIDES), which surveyed students in two racially diverse U.S. high-schools (N=4,369). We estimate a stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM), which has been used in several recent studies of ethnoracial segregation (Boda, 2018; Lezczenzky, 2018) and allows for endogenous change in both networks and ECAs. As shown in Table 1, preliminary models for the Midwest school found that friendships between two adolescents were 1.7 times (exp[.54]) greater for adolescents in the same activity (versus not in the same activity). Conversely, friends were 5 times (exp[1.61)]) more likely to join the same activity compared to adolescents who were not friends. Our next steps are to fit the model for the second school and specify additional effects to test race-related hypotheses.

Our study uses a newly-developed longitudinal two-mode, multivariate network analysis to address new questions about the sources of ethnoracial social segregation. Hence, we make an empirical contribution to understanding school-based friendship network dynamics and a theoretical contribution to understanding the sources of ethnoracial social segregation in intertwined peer contexts.

Authors

• David Schaefer, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Deborah Rivas-Drake, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Author

• Allison M Ryan, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Johannes Ashwin Rambaran, Universiteit Utrecht
  Non-Presenting Author

• Thoa Khuu, University of California Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author