Cross-Group Connections, Peer Network Dynamics, and Development of Diverse Youth

• In Event: Ethnically and Racially Diverse Classrooms, Friendships, and Their Developmental Consequences: Contributions of Social Network Analysis

Abstract

Within the context of diverse schools, contemporary adolescents have an opportunity to develop relationships with peers from different ethnic and racial, immigrant, and generational backgrounds (i.e., cross-group connections). For all youth, cross-group friendships promote positive intergroup attitudes (Davies et al., 2011), social skills (Lease & Blake, 2003), and academic outcomes (Hamm & Williams, 2018). For ethno-racial minority youth, both cross- and same-group friendships promote the development of such assets and resources as ethnic-racial identity (Jugert et al., 2018) and a sense of social belonging, support, and safety (Graham & Echols, 2018). Beyond these benefits, cross-group relationships may also pose challenges by taxing the well-being and mental health of youth of color (McGill et al., 2012). This evidence paints a complex landscape of opportunities and challenges of cross-group relationships for adolescent development (Yip et al., 2019).

To unpack the opportunities and challenges of cross-group connections, we adopt a dynamic view on adolescent development as embedded in social context such that adolescents actively select their peers and friends and are subsequently influenced by them. This means that cross-group connections emerge and function within a broader context of peer social networks. As such, their existence, structure, dynamics, and developmental consequences are contingent upon a confluence of intergroup, network, and developmental processes. Although many developmental theories (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Harris, 1995) emphasize that such reciprocal processes operate in peer settings, developmental research has lacked the tools to disentangle them in peer networks until the introduction of social network analysis (SNA; Veenstra et al., 2013). The key contribution of SNA to the study of adolescent relationships in the diverse settings is that it enables examination of how cross-group connections are formed in peer networks, while accounting for a host of confounding social processes, and how cross-group connections shape diverse youth's developmental outcomes.

Drawing on theoretical and methodological advances of SNA, this review seeks to clarify the paradox of diversity (Yip et al., 2019), in which cross-group connections may present opportunities and challenges for adolescent development. To do so, we propose an integrative account of how cross-group relationships, as embedded in peer networks, promote, protect, or interfere with developmental outcomes for diverse youth. This account is grounded in developmental and peer relations theories and enhanced with conceptual, substantive, and methodological promises of SNA to understand the role of cross-group connections and network dynamics for adolescent development. Specifically, we focus on theoretical mechanisms and empirical evidence on how cross-group connections in peer networks contribute to the development of (a) intergroup attitudes, (b) ethnic-racial identity, and (c) academic and socioemotional outcomes. Finally, we provide directions for future research and conclude by synthesizing how network dynamics of cross-group connections represent opportunities and challenges for the development of diverse youth.

Authors

• Olga Kornienko, George Mason University
  Presenting Author

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