To examine the peer context of adolescent substance use, social network analysis was used to measure three domains of attributes of peer networks: social embeddedness, social status, and social proximity to substance users. The sample was a panel of 5,104 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in three public school systems surveyed every 6 months for five assessments. Hierarchical generalized linear models showed that adolescents less embedded in the network, with greater status, and with closer social proximity to peer substance users were more likely to use substances. Also, adolescents in less dense networks and networks with higher smoking prevalence were more likely to smoke and use marijuana. Results establish the utility of social network analysis for measuring peer context and indicate that conventionality of relationships-having friends in the network, being liked but not too well liked, and having fewer friends who use substances-is most beneficial.Social network analysis has been identified as an appropriate method for studying the peer context of adolescent substance use (Ennett & Bauman, JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON ADOLESCENCE, 16(2), 159-186

CHRISTIAN SMITH MELINDA LUNDQUIST DENTON ROBERT FARIS MARK REGNERUSSociologists know surprisingly little about the religious lives of adolescents in the United States. This article begins to redress that unfortunate lack of knowledge by examining descriptive findings on adolescent religious participation from three recent, reputable national surveys of American youth. We present descriptive statistics on three fundamental aspects of youth religious participation: religious affiliation, religious service attendance, and involvement in church youth groups. We also examine the influences of gender, race, age, and region on these religious outcomes. This descriptive inquiry should help to heighten broader understanding of and to lay down a baseline of essential information about American adolescent religious participation. Further research is needed to investigate the social influence of different kinds of religiosity on various outcomes in the lives of American youth.We know relatively little about the religious lives of American adolescents. The vast majority of research in the sociology of religion in the United States focuses on American adults, ages 18 and older. And few scholars of American adolescents in other fields pay close attention to youth's religious lives. As a result, our social scientific knowledge of the religious affiliations, practices, beliefs, experiences, and attitudes of American youth is impoverished. 1 This is a problem for many reasons. American adolescents between the ages of 10-19 represent about 14 percent of all Americans (adolescents ages 10-24 represent 21 percent), an ageminority population deserving scholarly attention as much as any other group. Indeed, American adolescents may deserve extra scholarly attention by sociologists of religion. Adolescence represents a crucial developmental transition from childhood to adulthood and so can disclose a tremendous amount of knowledge about religious socialization and change in the life course. Adolescents are a population that many religious organizations, both congregations and parachurch ministries, particularly target in order to exert influence in their lives. Adolescence and young adulthood is also the life stage when religious conversion is most likely to take place. Adolescence furthermore provides a unique opportunity to study religious influences on family relationships and dynamics, peer interactions, risk behaviors, and many other outcome variables. Finally, adolescence provides an ideal baseline stage for longitudinal research on religious influences in people's lives.

A conceptual framework based on social ecology, social learning, and social control theories guided identification of social contexts, contextual attributes, and joint effects that contribute to development of adolescent alcohol misuse. Modeling of alcohol use, suggested by social learning theory, and indicators of the social bond, suggested by social control theory, were examined in the family, peer, school, and neighborhood contexts. Interactions between alcohol modeling and social bond indicators were tested within and between contexts. Data were from a longitudinal study of 6,544 students, 1,663 of their parents, and the U.S. Census. All contexts were uniquely implicated in development of alcohol misuse from ages 11 through 17 years and most alcohol modeling effects were contingent on attributes of social bonds.A social ecological perspective suggests that multiple social contexts and the interdependencies among contexts must be considered in explaining development of adolescent problem behaviors, such as alcohol misuse. While adolescent alcohol use and misuse have been recognized as shaped by social contexts and processes (e.g., Brook, Nomura, & Cohen, 1989;Perry, Kelder, & Komro, 1993;Petraitis, Flay, & Miller, 1995), research on higher level contexts, such as schools and neighborhoods, is less common than research on peer and family contexts. Comprehensive examination of the multiple contexts comprising the social ecology of adolescent alcohol use is even more limited. Explanation for the lack of social ecological research may rest in the magnitude of conceptual and analytic demands when multiple social contexts that are themselves multidimensional are jointly considered.We draw on theories of ecology of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1977;1979), social learning (Akers, Krohn, Lanza-Kaduce, & Radosevich, 1979; Bandura, 1977;Petraitis et al., 1995), and social control (Hirschi, 1969;Petraitis et al., 1995) to examine development of alcohol misuse in adolescence by specifying a set of social contexts, attributes of those contexts, and interrelations among those attributes to examine. Our purpose is to use these theories to identify a parsimonious set of contextual attributes, while broadly considering the multiple social contexts in which adolescents' lives are embedded, that in interaction with each other could meaningfully explain development of adolescent alcohol misuse. Bronfenbrenner's Ecology of Human Development TheoryBronfenbrenner's theory provides the overarching conceptual framework by establishing a developmental perspective, defining the social contexts for investigation, specifying the need for an inclusive, multidimensional view of these social contexts, and suggesting relationships of the contexts to each other and the developing adolescent. The central precepts of the ecology of human development are that human development takes place Address correspondence to: Susan T. Ennett, Campus Box 7440, Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, The University of North Carolina ...

Peer attributes other than smoking have received little attention in the research on adolescent smoking, even though the developmental literature suggests the importance of multiple dimensions of adolescent friendships and peer relations. Social network analysis was used to measure the structure of peer relations (i.e., indicators of having friends, friendship quality, and status among peers) and peer smoking (i.e., friend and school smoking). We used three-level hierarchical growth models to examine the contribution of each time-varying peer variable to individual trajectories of smoking from age 11 to 17 while controlling for the other variables, and we tested interactions between the peer structure and peer smoking variables. Data were collected over five waves of assessment from a longitudinal sample of 6,579 students in three school districts. Findings suggest a greater complexity in the peer context of smoking than previously recognized.

Literature on aggression often suggests that individual deficiencies, such as social incompetence, psychological difficulties, or troublesome home environments, are responsible for aggressive behavior. In this article, by contrast, we examine aggression from a social network perspective, arguing that social network centrality, our primary measure of peer status, increases the capacity for aggression and that competition to gain or maintain status motivates its use. We test these arguments using a unique longitudinal dataset that enables separate consideration of same- and cross-gender aggression. We find that aggression is generally not a maladjusted reaction typical of the socially marginal; instead, aggression is intrinsic to status and escalates with increases in peer status until the pinnacle of the social hierarchy is attained. Over time, individuals at the very bottom and those at the very top of a hierarchy become the least aggressive youth. We also find that aggression is influenced not so much by individual gender differences as by relationships with the other gender and patterns of gender segregation at school. When cross-gender interactions are plentiful, aggression is diminished. Yet these factors are also jointly implicated in peer status: in schools where cross-gender interactions are rare, cross-gender friendships create status distinctions that magnify the consequences of network centrality.