The importance of friends among foster youth aging out of care: Cluster profiles of deviant peer affiliations ¬リニ

a r t i c l e i n f o The importance of friends during the developmental periods of childhood and adolescence is widely accepted and there is reason to believe that deviant peers play an important role in influencing the experiences and outcomes of young people aging out of foster care. This article uses Latent Class Analysis to explore the role that deviant peers play in the lives of these young people by empirically examining the heterogeneity of deviant peer affiliations in a sample of youth aging out of care. A three class solution exhibited the best fit and the classes consisted of youth with low, medium, and high levels of deviant peer affiliations. Using a range of covariates to validate the classes, we found that youth exhibiting high levels of deviant peer affiliations were more likely to be fired from a job, to possess a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, to report higher levels of substance use, and to report being arrested than youth in the other two classes. Youth in the low deviant peer affiliation class exhibited higher levels of family support and lower levels of neighborhood disorder than youth in the other two classes. The research, policy, and practice implications of these findings are discussed. The importance of friends during the developmental periods of childhood and adolescence is widely accepted as research has consistently found that children and adolescents can be easily influenced (Maxwell, 2002), especially by those in their peer groups (Steinberg and Scott, 2003). The specific influence of friends on developmental trajectories is not invariant, however, but is dependent on the nature of those contacts. Numerous studies have found that children and youth with friends do better across a range of dimensions than those without friends (e.g., Güroğlu, van Lieshout, Haselager, & Scholte, 2007). At the same time, a rich research base has also found that associations with deviant peers are related to a greater likelihood of delinquency and other negative behaviors such as substance use it is important that research on children and youth examines the effects that peer relationships have on different types of youth. Despite this robust literature, the effect of friends on foster youth aging out of care has yet to be systematically studied. This omission is particularly significant because there is reason to believe that deviant peer affiliations may play an important role in the outcomes of youth …