Peer Relationships Flashcards
Who do adolescents spend a lot of time with?
Their peers
Did adolescents always spend a lot of time with their peers?
No, it wasn’t always like that
What is age grading?
Students grouped by age in school
When did adolescent peer groups become prevalent?
In the 20th century, since most people didn’t make it past elementary school, since education was a luxury
What are peer groups?
Groups of individuals of approximately the same age
What do peer groups establish?
They establish a sense of comradery
Are peer groups important nowadays for adolescents?
Yes, peer groups are immensely important during adolescent development
What is the key event that happened for generation z?
Internet explosion
How does the proportion of the population that is adolescent vary around the world?
- Highest in developing countries, especially in the Arab world
- Lowest in highly industrialized countries, like Japan
- This trend is expected to continue such that the percentage of youth in the population will continue to decline
Why do peers become so important during adolescence?
As we move through childhood into adolescence, we are more independent and spend less time with adults and more with peers
Do peer groups get larger or smaller during adolescence?
Peer groups get larger as adolescents
What causes peer groups to change?
- Puberty stimulates adolescents’ interest in romantic relationships and distances them from their parents
- The cognitive changes of adolescence permit a more sophisticated understanding of social relationships
- Changes in social definition may stimulate changes in peer relations as a sort of
adaptive response
What are the two general types of peer groups?
Cliques and crowds
What are cliques?
Small, tightly knit groups of 2 and 12 friends, generally of the same sex and age
What are crowds?
Reputation-based clusters of youths, whose function in part is to help solidify young people’s social and personal identity
What do cliques provide?
Cliques provide the main social context in which adolescents interact
with one another
- Can be defined by common activities (i.e. sports teams, extracurricular activities)
or friendship (i.e. growing up together, living on the same block)
What do crowds include?
Crowds include “jocks,” “brains,” “nerds,” “populars,” and “druggies”
(Labels may vary, but the groups are commonplace)
What is the contrast of cliques to crowds?
In contrast to Cliques, membership in a crowd is based mainly on reputation and stereotype, NOT on actual friendship or social interaction
True or False: Changing membership in a crowd is easy
FALSE.
Changing membership in a crowd can be very difficult
What do crowds contribute more to?
Crowds likely contribute more to the adolescent’s sense of identity and self-conception than to his or her actual social development
How do you determine clique membership?
- Orientation toward school
- Orientations toward the teen culture
- Involvement in antisocial activity
What is orientation toward school in terms of clique membership?
- Adolescents and their friends tend to be similar in their attitudes toward school, school achievement, and educational plans
- Students also influence each other’s academic performance
What is orientations toward the teen culture in terms of clique membership?
- Adolescents and their friends generally share similarities in music, dress, leisure activities, and drug use
- In most high schools, it is easy to see the split between cliques
What is involvement in antisocial activity in terms of clique membership
Antisocial, aggressive adolescents gravitate toward each other and form deviant peer groups
What traits do cliques share?
- Age
- Race/ethnicity
- Socioeconomic background
- Sex
Why is age important in traits that cliques share?
- Age grouping in junior and senior high schools makes it unlikely that an individual will have friends who are substantially older or younger.
- Age segregation in adolescents’ cliques appears to result mostly from the structure of schools.
- Adolescents’ online friends are less similar in age than the friends they make in school
Why is race/ethnicity important in traits that cliques share?
- Ethnicity is not a strong determinant of clique composition in childhood, but by adolescence, it is an enormously powerful
determinant. - Adolescents are more likely to have friends of same ethnicity from different social classes than friends from the same social class but different ethnic group
Why are adolescents more likely to have friends of the same ethnicity from different social classes than friends for the same social class but different ethnic group?
- This is only partially due to residential segregation
- It may be partially due to differential levels of academic achievement of adolescents from different ethnic groups
- Both adolescent and parental attitudes are factors
- Broader context also matters
Is socioeconomic background important in traits that cliques share?
To some extent, but likely related to neighborhood factors
Is sex an important trait in traits that cliques share?
At least during early and middle adolescence
- This begins in childhood and continues through most of adolescence, weakening later.
- It is due partly to early shared activities and interests.
- Sex segregation also results from concerns about behaving in sex-appropriate ways.
- Once dating becomes the norm, those lacking relationships with peers of the other sex are objects of strong suspicion and social
rejection…
Why are crowds more important?
Crowds act as reference groups and provide their members with an identity in the eyes of
others
- Crowd membership is often the basis for an adolescent’s own identity
- Adolescents judge one another on the basis of the company they keep, and they become branded on the basis of the people they hang out with
The nature of the crowd is likely to have an important influence on member’s behavior, activities, self-conceptions, and opinions about others and themselves
What are reference groups?
A group against which an individual compares him or herself
True or False: Self-esteem is lower among students who belong to “high status” crowds
FALSE.
Self-esteem is higher among students who belong to “high status” crowds
What are the two dimensions that the social world of adolescents can be classified along?
- How involved they are in the institutions controlled by adults, such as school and extracurricular activities
- How involved they are in the informal, peer culture
Who are high in involvement in adult institutions but low in involvement in peer culture?
Nerds
Who are low in involvement in adult institutions and low in involvement in peer culture?
Toughs
Who are low in involvement in adult institutions but high in involvement in peer culture?
Partyers
Who are high in involvement in adult institutions and high in involvement in peer culture?
Jocks and populars
Who are high in involvement in adult institutions but medium in involvement in peer culture?
Brains
Who are low in involvement in adult institutions but medium in involvement in peer culture?
Druggies
Who are medium in involvement in adult institutions and medium in involvement in peer culture?
Normals
What does your crowd significantly influence?
Your behavior
What is the relation between crowds and ethnicity?
- In multiethnic environments adolescents first divide across ethnic lines, then form crowds
- The meaning associated with belonging to different crowds differs across ethnic (and
socioeconomic) groups
True or False: Values associated with being in one crowd as opposed to another also vary slightly
from school to school
TRUE
What do individuals within a crowd typically do?
- Imitate the crowd leader behavior
- Strive to follow the crowd’s established social norms
- Receive reinforcement for following norms,
further incorporate crowd membership into your identity
What happens to crowd structure over time?
- By 9th grade, there is nearly universal agreement among students about their
school’s crowd structure, and the strength of peer group influence is very high BUT THIS DECLINES between 9th and 12th grades. - The decline in the prominence of peer crowds parallels developmental changes in
adolescents’ susceptibility to peer pressure
The decline is also related to adolescents’ developing sense of identity
- Older adolescents may feel that being part of a crowd is stifling
Why is the death of cliques and crowds the birth of romance?
- In early adolescence, activities revolve around same-sex cliques
- As romantic interest builds, but before romantic relationships begin, boys’
and girls’ cliques come together - In middle adolescence, mixed-sex and mixed-age cliques become more
prevalent. Peer group is eventually entirely mixed-sex clique
What happens to peer groups in late adolescences?
- Peer crowds begin to disintegrate
- Couples begin to split off from larger group.
-These changes in peer groups parallel adolescent’s development of intimacy…
What was Judith Harris’s new theory of child development and nurture?
Judith Harris (1994) formulated a new theory of child development, focusing on the peer group rather than
the family as the critical component of “Nurture”
- She argued that studies which claim to show the
influence of the parents on the trajectory of child
development fail to control for genetic influences - For example, if aggressive parents are more likely to have
aggressive children, this is not necessarily evidence of parental influence; it may also be that aggressiveness has
been passed down through the genes
Do adolescents develop interests and attitudes because friends influence them, or do people with similar interests and
tastes become friends?
- Studies indicate that both selection and
socialization are at work across a variety of
attitudinal and behavioral domains - But, socialization is far stronger over day-
to-day preferences in things like music than
over many of the behaviors that adults worry about
What is the stability of adolescent friendships?
- Cliques show only moderate stability over
the course of the school year, although they
are more stable later in high school - Only about one-third of students who name
a best friend in the fall of a school year rename the same person as their best friend in the spring
Are girls or boys friendships more stable?
- Boys’ friendships tend to be more stable
What are the most common causes of broken friendships?
The most common causes of broken friendships are jealousy, incompatibility,
betrayal, and aggression
- Friendships in the 7th grade virtually never survive through the end of high school. Many friendships dissolve between 7th and 8th grade.
