Adolescent intergroup connections and their developmental benefits: Exploring contributions from social network analysis

Understanding Social Influence of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury: The Interplay of Peer Networks and Adolescent Behavior

Adolescents' non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) could be influenced by their friends' NSSI and by their own social position within peer networks. However, prior research has examined these effects separately and has primarily focused on middle-to-late adolescence. It remains unclear how friends' NSSI relates to adolescents' NSSI under different social positions and how these effects differ across different age stages. This study examined both the independent and interactive effects of the number of friends engaging in NSSI, the number of claiming friends, and the extent of bridging different peer groups on adolescents' NSSI behaviors within classroom-based social networks. The sample included 9581 Chinese adolescents (44.6% girls, Mage = 13.72, SD = 1.87) from 221 classroom-based friendship networks, comprising 4248 early adolescents and 5333 middle-to-late adolescents. Social network analyses were used to extract network-related indicators, while general linear mixed models were employed to test the hypotheses. Results revealed that adolescents with more friends engaging in NSSI faced a higher risk of engaging in NSSI themselves; however, this risk decreased for adolescents with more claiming friends, irrespective of age. Adolescents who acted as bridges between different peer groups and had an above-average number of claiming friends were more likely to engage in NSSI, but this was only the case in early adolescence. These findings suggest NSSI can spread through friendship networks, with social connections influencing how likely adolescents are to be affected. Incorporating social network assessments into mental health screenings might facilitate early identification and prevention of NSSI among youth.

Social network analysis in social psychological ressearch (1990-2020): A scoping review

Over the last two decades, Social Network Analysis (SNA) has become a standard tool in various social science disciplines. In social psychology, however, the use of SNA methodology remains scarce. This research identifies gaps in SNA use in Social Psychology and offers pathways for its further development. It reviews all empirical papers using SNA published in high-ranking social psychology journals over the last three decades. Findings reveal that SNA has been used across striking diversity of fields and subdomains central to the discipline, confirming its relevance for any field in Social Psychology in which the role of interpersonal or intergroup relationships is central to understand psychological and behavioural outcomes. However, the use of SNA in Social Psychology has been mostly limited to non-experimental and non-longitudinal studies, using student samples and with a focus on basic measurements of network structures such as density and centrality. The contributions of SNA to the understanding of psychosocial mechanisms have therefore remained modest. We propose several strategies by which such gaps can be filled in future research and the full potential of SNA for social psychology realized.

Friendship Network and School Socialization Correlates of Adolescent Ethnic-Racial Identity Development

Ethnic-racial identity (ERI) development is consequential for youth adjustment and includes exploration, resolution, and affect about the meaning of one's ethnic-racial group membership. Little is known about how identity-relevant experiences, such as ethnic-racial socialization and discrimination in peer relationships and school contexts, catalyze adolescent ERI development. The present study examines how identity-relevant experiences in friend and school contexts (i.e., proportion of same-ethnoracial friends, cultural socialization among friends, friends' ERI dimensions, friends' experiences of ethnoracial discrimination, and school promotion of cultural competence and critical consciousness) are associated with ERI development. A multivariate path model with a sample from four southwestern U.S. schools (N = 717; 50.5% girls; Mage = 13.76; 32% Latinx, 31.5% Multiethnic, 25.7% White, 11% other) was used to test these associations. Findings showed that friend and school predictors of ERI did not differ between early and middle adolescents, but significant differences and similarities emerged in some of these associations between ethnoracially minoritized and White youth. Specifically, friend cultural socialization was positively associated with ERI exploration for ethnoracially minoritized youth only, whereas school critical consciousness socialization was positively linked with ERI exploration only for White youth. Friend cultural socialization and friend network's levels of ERI resolution were positively associated with ERI resolution across both ethnoracial groups. These friend and school socialization associations were documented above and beyond significant contributions of personal ethnoracial discrimination to ERI exploration and negative affect for both ethnoracially minoritized and White youth. These findings expand our understanding of how friend and school socialization mechanisms are associated with adolescent ERI development, which is vital to advancing developmental theory and fostering developmental competences for youth to navigate their multicultural yet socially stratified and inequitable world.

Daily agreeableness and acculturation processes in ethnic/racial minority freshmen: The role of inter-ethnic contact and perceived discrimination

OBJECTIVES

Having higher levels of mainstream cultural orientation (MCO), an important component of acculturation attitudes and behaviors, is beneficial for ethnic/racial minority students during the transitions into university. Scant research has investigated MCO at a micro daily timescale. This study examined how personality (agreeableness) functions in conjunction with interpersonal processes (inter-ethnic contact and perceived discrimination) to influence MCO as daily within-person processes.

METHODS

Multi-level structural equation modeling were used to analyze month-long daily diary data from 209 ethnic/racial minority freshmen (69% female).

RESULTS

There was a positive indirect association between agreeableness and MCO through inter-ethnic contact at both within- and between-person levels. At the within-person level, on days with lower (vs. higher) levels of ethnic/racial discrimination, higher levels of agreeableness were associated with higher levels of MCO.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings highlight the contributions of intensive longitudinal data in elucidating ethnic/racial minority students' personality and acculturation processes in daily life involving protective and risk factors on micro timescales.

Adolescent friendship, cross-sexuality ties, and attitudes toward sexual minorities: A social network approach to intergroup contact

Social ties between members of in- and outgroups are theorized to reduce individual levels of prejudice. However, instances of intergroup contact are not isolated events; cross-group interactions are embedded in broader networks defined by various social processes that guide the formation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships. This project reconsiders the potential benefits of intergroup contact by applying a network perspective to examine whether friendships between youth of different sexualities can shape individuals' homophobic attitudes. The impact of cross-sexuality ties is evaluated through the application of stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOMs) to a two-wave sample of Dutch adolescents. Results indicate that the benefits of cross-sexuality connections become negligible when we account for how patterns of network connectivity and segregation are informed by other individual-level traits, such as age, religious background, ethnicity, and gender. In other words, heterosexual adolescents who are situated in network positions that provide opportunities to form cross-sexuality friendships would be expected to report less homophobic attitudes even in the absence of this intergroup contact. These findings suggest that the cross-sexuality contact observed in the social world often represents instances of "preaching to the choir," limiting the potential for intergroup connections to challenge systems of social inequality.

Racial Discrimination Experiences and Friendship Network Dynamics Among Black and Latinx Youth

Despite a robust volume of evidence documenting adverse effects of racial discrimination experiences on adolescent adjustment outcomes, relatively little is known about the relational consequences of racial discrimination experiences for adolescent friendship networks. To address this gap, this study examines how racial discrimination experiences shape and are shaped by friendship network dynamics in early and middle adolescence. The current study's goals were to explicate whether relational consequences of racial discrimination experiences for friendship network selection differed between interracial and intraracial friendships among Black and Latinx youth, and how these adolescents were influenced by their friends' racial discrimination experiences. Longitudinal social network analysis was used among a sample of predominantly Latinx and Black middle school students from the southwestern U.S. (n = 1034; 50.1% boys, Mage = 12.1, 13.8% White, 18.6% Black, 53.1% Latinx, 14.4% Other race and multiracial). The results showed that Black and Latinx youth preferred intraracial friends. Above and beyond that, Black youth were more likely to have intraracial friendships when the focal individual reported lower levels of general racial discrimination experiences and higher levels of adult-perpetrated racial discrimination experiences. Black and Latinx adolescents reported increases in general racial discrimination experiences over time, as a function of their friends reporting higher levels of racial discrimination (e.g., peer influence). These findings advance developmental research by showing that racial discrimination experiences are consequential for friendship network dynamics by increasing the likelihood of intraracial friend selection among Black youth and through peer influence processes.

Testing the stakeholders' partnership in a tourism waste management network: an ERGM approach

The exponential random graph model (ERGM) is an effective approach for testing the dynamic and local processes of a network. This paper explores the structure of stakeholders' partnerships in a tourism waste management network using high-order dependency ERGMs based on relational data obtained from a field survey in Motuo County, China. The results reveal that (1) the network has many edges, indicating a tight network; (2) the geometrically weighted edge distribution shows a high transitive effect of the network; (3) the structural effect is more significant than the attribute effect; (4) there is a good agreement between the simulation results and observations, suggesting a tourism waste network with close connections and collaborative division of labor. These findings indicate that different groups of stakeholders have been extensively involved in tourism waste management in Motuo County. The edgewise shared partners formed by stakeholders of different groups increase the information transmission efficiency of the network. The results have implications for tourism waste management, specifically for promoting sustainability transitions via network governance.

Strong and weak tie homophily in adolescent friendship networks: An analysis of same-race and same-gender ties

While we know that adolescents tend to befriend peers who share their race and gender, it is unclear whether patterns of homophily vary according to the strength, intimacy, or connectedness of these relationships. By applying valued exponential random graph models to a sample of 153 adolescent friendship networks, I test whether tendencies towards same-race and same-gender friendships differ for strong versus weak relational ties. In nondiverse, primarily white networks, weak ties are more likely to connect same-race peers, while racial homophily is not associated with the formation of stronger friendships. As racial diversity increases, however, strong ties become more likely to connect same-race peers, while weaker bonds are less apt to be defined by racial homophily. Gender homophily defines the patterns of all friendship ties, but these tendencies are more pronounced for weaker connections. My results highlight the empirical value of considering tie strength when examining social processes in adolescent networks.