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One Bad Apple May Not Spoil the Whole Bunch: Best Friends and Adolescent Delinquency

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Abstract

This study compared the association of adolescent delinquency with that of their best friend and remaining social network. Findings are reported from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a multi-wave nationally representative panel study of adolescents who were in grades 7–12 in 1994. Four delinquent outcomes were examined: Smoking, getting drunk, fighting, and a variety index of general delinquency. All analyses were replicated for three distinct criteria for identifying a “best friend.” We also examined several moderating factors and potential interrelationships between the best friend and remaining friendship group. Relative to the influence of the best friend, the influence of the remaining friendship group increased with group size, and with larger absolute disparities in delinquency levels between best and remaining friends. Our findings extend knowledge on the influence of best friends, and further underscore the importance of whether peer behaviors are measured directly (from the peers themselves) or indirectly (when focal respondents estimate the delinquent behavior of their peers).

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Notes

  1. The literature currently lacks an accepted definition of “best friend.” Instead, there are several credible alternative criteria. An individual’s best friend may simply be the person he or she perceives to be his or her best friend. Or, that person’s best friend may also be the individual he or she spends the most time with, does the widest range of activities with, or feels emotionally closest to. These criteria may not identify the same “best friend.” For these reasons, the ensuing analyses are replicated for three different “best friend” criteria.

  2. Also relevant is the emerging structural perspective on peer influence (Haynie 2001, 2002; Krohn et al. 1988). Rather than specific connections between individuals, this perspective emphasizes the structural characteristics of peer networks and individuals’ positions within them as important determinants of the behavioral concordance among network members. For example, Haynie (2001) found that the density of a friendship network (proportion of actual ties to possible ties between members) and an adolescent’s centrality and popularity within that network all affect the degree to which network members behave similarly to one another. Rather than compete with the perspectives above, the structural approach complements them by identifying additional determinants of peer influence those perspectives do not tend to address. Under the structural perspective, peer influence cannot be fully understood without specific attention to features of groups and individuals’ positions within them.

  3. Some exceptions are Weerman and Smeenk (2005) and Selfhout et al. (2008).

  4. For example, in the Add health study, the in-school survey was given to all students in each school.

  5. This criterion excluded 146 additional respondents who were either 10, 11, or 19 years old at the in-school interview. These respondents were clearly non-normative for grades 7–12, with no counterbalancing possibility of grade normative representation at these ages.

  6. We used Stata’s -ice- command to impute (see Royston 2004, 2005a, 2005b) the missing values of the following variables: respondent in-school delinquency (general, smoking, drinking, and fighting), public assistance, school attachment, parental education, respondent GPA, parental attachment, and two parents at home. Missing values of the dependent variables and key explanatory variables were not imputed. All analyses included dummy variables which indicated whether or not the value of an independent variable was imputed.

  7. The complexities of the Add Health data also necessitate appropriately accounting for missing data in order to accurately calculate point estimates and to ensure generalizability of results. All analyses followed the recommendations of Chantala and Tabor (1999, p. 11).

  8. This roster also included names from sister schools associated with the respondent’s school.

  9. The Add Health data have two other options for identifying friends. First is the receive network, which consists of all individuals who named the respondent as a friend. Second, the nomination and receive network consists of all individuals who either the respondent named as a friend or who named the respondent as a friend. Since the results were fundamentally the same under all three approaches to constructing an egocentric network, the ensuing analyses use the nomination network.

  10. The Wave II and in-school general delinquency indices do not match precisely but prior research using the same outcomes measured at Wave I has shown that the in-school minor delinquency index is a reasonable and conservative predictor of personal/peer delinquency association when the outcome is the more comprehensive Wave I general delinquency index (Haynie 2001, see also Payne and Cornwell 2007).

  11. Recall that the findings were comparable for the other two criteria for identifying best friends.

  12. Cases with valid responses for both the mother and father were assigned the average of the two.

  13. In each case, Poisson regression was inappropriate because the overdispersion parameter was statistically distinguishable from zero.

  14. Recall that parallel analyses with the behavioral and same gender definitions of best friend produced comparable results to those in Tables 2, 3, 4 and 5.

  15. An adjusted Wald test was used to test for equality of coefficients (Korn and Graubard 1990). The same result was obtained with the statistical test suggested in Paternoster et al. (1998).

  16. F = 5.58, df = (1, 109), p = 0.019.

  17. Several p-values rose above .05 in part because we split the sample roughly in half and lost some statistical power.

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Acknowledgment

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.

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  1. School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, Albany, NY, 12222, USA

    Carter Rees & Greg Pogarsky

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  1. Carter Rees
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Correspondence to Greg Pogarsky.

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Table 6 Coding of Variables
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Rees, C., Pogarsky, G. One Bad Apple May Not Spoil the Whole Bunch: Best Friends and Adolescent Delinquency. J Quant Criminol 27, 197–223 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-010-9103-9

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