NCJ Number
248364
Journal
Journal of Youth and Adolescence Volume: 43 Issue: 9 Dated: September 2014 Pages: 1436-1452
Date Published
September 2014
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This article focuses on the degree to which friends' influence on substance use is conditioned by the consistency between their behavior and that of schoolmates (individuals enrolled in the same school, but not identified as friends), contributing to the literature on the complexity of interactive social influences during adolescence.
Abstract
Specifically, it hypothesizes that friends' influence will diminish as their norms become less similar to that of schoolmates. The authors also propose that this conditioning relationship is related to the density of the friendship group. This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add-Health) (n ~ 8,000, 55 percent female) to examine the interactive relationship between friend and schoolmate influences on adolescent substance use (smoking and drinking). The sample contains students ranging from age 11 to 22 and is 60 percent White. The findings demonstrate that, as the substance use of the friendship group becomes more dissimilar from schoolmates' substance use, the friendship group's influence on adolescent substance use diminishes. Further, the results demonstrate that this conditioning relationship does not emerge when the friendship group is highly dense. (Published Abstract)