Are there differences in ethnic majority and minority adolescents’ friendships preferences and social influence with regard to their academic achievement?

Abstract

Research has established that adolescents both befriend peers based on their academic achievement and adjust their own achievement to that of their friends' over time. However, these processes may be different for ethnic minority students, because some of them may adhere to an oppositional culture that rejects striving for academic success. We examine respective differences between self-identified ethnic minority and majority students using longitudinal social network analysis (stochastic actor-oriented models) in a sample of 1175 students (aged 13) from 12 gradelevel networks in Germany secondary schools. Among the students, we find that academically successful students in particular prefer friends with high grades, but that students with poor grades exert more social influence on their friends to adjust their performance. Moreover, while minority students are indeed less inclined to select friends with higher grades, both ethnic majority and minority youth prefer friends with similar academic achievement and are similarly influenced by their friends' achievement. However, social influence is stronger from same-ethnic than from inter-ethnic friends. In sum, there is mixed evidence for an oppositional culture among ethnic minority students in our sample. Keywords

Peer cultural socialisation: a resource for minority students’ cultural identity, life satisfaction, and school values

“…Future longitudinal research, daily diaries, and network analyses may further clarify directions of effects and questions of friendship reciprocity (e.g. Stark, Leszczensky, and Pink 2017). Despite controlling for important covariates, our results only explained a small amount of variance of the variables of interest.…”

Differential Influence of Same‐ and Cross‐Ethnic Friends on Ethnic‐Racial Identity Development in Early Adolescence

“…One important avenue for further research is examining whether the distinction of same‐ and cross‐ethnic friends also is consequential for social influence on individual outcomes other than ERI. For example, a recent study by Stark, Leszczensky, and Pink () showed that peer influence on academic achievement was stronger from same‐ethnic than from cross‐ethnic friends. This finding suggests that the distinction of peer influence of same‐ and cross‐ethnic friends is also relevant for outcomes unrelated to ethnicity.…”

Oppositional culture revisited. Friendship dynamics and the creation of social capital among Turkish minority adolescents in Germany

“…Strong reliance on the ethnic ingroup might then be expressed by positive attitudes towards education (Ogbu and Simons 1998). This might also explain why research on the European context has not produced any clear evidence for a culture of school-disengagement among ethnic minority youth (Stark, Leszczensky, and Pink 2017;van Tubergen and van Gaans 2016).…”