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Peer Standing and Substance Use in Early-Adolescent Grade-Level Networks: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study

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Abstract

Two competing hypotheses were tested concerning the associations between current alcohol and cigarette use and measures of individual, group and network peer standing in an ethnically-diverse sample of 156 male and female adolescents sampled at two time points in the seventh grade. Findings lent greater support to the person hypothesis, with early regular substance users enjoying elevated standing amongst their peers and maintaining this standing regardless of their maintenance of or desistance from current use later in the school year. In the fall semester, users (n=20, 13%) had greater social impact, were described by their peers as more popular, and were more central to the peer network than abstainers (i.e., those who did not report current use).

Conversely, in the spring semester, there were no differences between users (n=22, 13%) and abstainers in peer ratings of popularity or social impact. Notably, the spring semester users group retained fewer than half of the users from the fall semester. Further, students who had reported current use in the fall, as a group, retained their positions of elevated peer standing in the spring, compared to all other students, and continued to be rated by their peers as more popular and as having greater social impact.

We discuss the findings in terms of the benefit of employing simultaneous systemic and individual measures of peer standing or group prominence, which in the case of peer-based prevention programs, can help clarify the truly influential from the “pretenders” in the case of diffusion of risk-related behaviors.

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Notes

  1. Users in the fall were somewhat older than abstainers, means=12.50 and 12.19, t(154)=2.634, p < .01. However, age was minimally related to just two variables in the fall and one in the spring, and the correlations, while significant, were small (rs < .20). Moreover, partialling age from the bivariate correlations had only a very small effect on the size of the coefficients, leading us to discount the influence of age on our main study variables and findings.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported with grant 1P20 DA017589-02 from NIDA, awarded to Duke University TPRC (Phil Costanzo, Co-PI). Ley A. Killeya-Jones was supported by grant F32 HD48029-01 from NICHD, while developing this manuscript. Portions of these data were previously presented at the 2005 conference on Applications of Social Network Analysis to the Prevention of Substance Use & Delinquency, The Pennsylvania University, State College, PA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Child and Family Policy, Duke University, Box 90545, Durham, NC, 27798, USA

    Ley A. Killeya-Jones, Ryo Nakajima & Philip R. Costanzo

  2. Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan

    Ryo Nakajima

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  1. Ley A. Killeya-Jones
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Correspondence to Ley A. Killeya-Jones.

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Killeya-Jones, L.A., Nakajima, R. & Costanzo, P.R. Peer Standing and Substance Use in Early-Adolescent Grade-Level Networks: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study. Prev Sci 8, 11–23 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-006-0053-2

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