| Jennifer Flashman
University of California, Los Angeles
Adolescent friendship groups: Preferences, dynamics, and implications for future stratification
FINAL REPORT:
Great disparities in educational achievement and attainment exist across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Adolescent friendship s may both contribute to and detract from these disparities. This dissertation studies the role that friendship preferences, dynamics, and influence play in affecting disparities in educational achievement. I show how friends affect the stratification process indirectly through friendship choice and friendship change, and directly through friendship influence. Throughout this dissertation I use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The first and second chapters describe the friendship choices of adolescents. Using discrete choice analysis, the first chapter compares racial preferences for individual friends and friendship groups across school racial compositions. This chapter finds that greater exposure to different race individuals increases preferences for different race friends. Using the same methods, the second chapter tests the oppositional culture hypothesis that high-achieving black students are disparaged by their black peers by estimating adolescents’Äô joint preferences for academic and racial compositions of friendship groups. This chapter shows that high-achieving black students in black schools prefer lower-achieving friends compared to high-achieving black students in schools with small black populations. Results suggest that school contexts may have important impacts on the development of oppositional norms. The third chapter describes changes in friendships among adolescents. Using continuous time Markov chain models, I model the relationship between academic achievement and friendship change, showing that adolescents change their friendship ties to maximize similarity in achievement between themselves and their friends. Finally, the last chapter of this dissertation estimates the effect of friends on adolescents’Äô academic outcomes. Using a variety of methods, including fixed effects models and instrumental variables, to partially account for endogeneity and selection, I estimate a range of possible effects of friends on academic achievement. I show that estimation method has important impacts on the size and significance of estimated friend effects; the effect of friends on achievement ranges from a strong and important effect to no effect at all. Overall, this dissertation provides a comprehensive look at the process of friendship choice, dynamics and influence to better understand the role of friends in the stratification process.
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