The Impact of Co-evolution of Dynamic Networks upon Adolescent Deviant Behaviors

Abstract

The issue of whether behavioral similarity between friends is due to peer influence, friendship selection, or both has been raised and discussed abundantly in the literature. These two opposite theoretical perspectives have their own advocates respectively to justify the casual relationship between individual action and social network structure while some studies leave this question open and apply quantitative methods on empirical data to examine either selection or influence causes similarity among group members. This study imposes two issues at least have been gotten less attention in the literature and should not be omitted. One is behavior side: only dealing with monotonic dimension of conceptualizing adolescent behavior. The other issue is network structure side: features of friendship network structure are treated as independent variables in the model to examine the relationship between individual behavior and social network. A longitudinal data was employed to observe the changes of adolescents' friendship and their behavior in a number of networks. A total of 41 classroom networks had been collected in the first grade of secondary school (2,690 students), measuring multidimensional behaviors and friendship nominations at three time points in one school year to obtain longitudinal information about behavior and network dynamics. The respondents nominated up to 3 best friends in class and answered other questions about their experiences in family and school. To model and analyze the data, a multidimensional scaling model with dynamics of friendship network is employed to obtain adolescent network similarity/dissimilarity and observe multidimensional behaviors for the joint analysis of selection-influence effects on behavioral similarity between peers.