Adolescent Social Networks: Friendship Cliques, Social Isolates, and Drug Use Risk

Orientation toward peers and immersion in friendships are defining features of Yet adolescent friendships are not expressed in a single way. Among the many simple forms friendships can take are best friendships between a pair of adolescents, friendships involving peers other than the best friend, and friendship groups formed of a tight cluster of more than two friends. Some adolescents have wide ranging friendships where they intermix with many peers, while others have relatively few friendships. Taken together, these friendship patterns form the social network that binds adolescents into an overall matrix of peer relationships. The friendship patterns evident in adolescents' social networks have important implications for adolescent behavior, including problem behaviors such as drug use, delinquency, and sexual behavior. Through friendships, adolescents learn about what others are doing, anticipate accepted and expected behaviors, figure out how to present themselves, and find partners for trying out new behaviors. The diversity and importance of adolescent friendships to understanding adolescent behavior is well known to teachers. Knowing which adolescents hang out together, for example, or which adolescents are at the fringes of involvement with their peers provides insights into their behavior. Like keen teacher observers, some researchers have studied adolescent friendships and behaviors by blending into the school environment and watching Social network analysis is a way of using information provided by adolescents about their friends to map friendships. In general, social network analysis uses the aggregated data on the relationships reported by individuals in the same social system (e.g., for adolescents, the friendships among students in the same school) to identify groups and other relationship patterns. Network analysis identifies relationship patterns through analysis of the relationships that are present and absent between the individuals in the network. A key attribute of network analysis is that it makes clear that adolescent friendships are differentiated into various patterns rather than one pattern that fits all adolescents. This method of studying friendship is a major development for systematically describing the diversity in adolescent friendships. The most familiar friendship pattern captured by social network analysis, and the one generally thought to characterize adolescence, is the friendship group or clique. A clique is a small group of at least three adolescents whose primary friendships are with each other. Although most adolescents have a best friend, best friendship pairs are usually embedded in a friendship clique instead of standing alone. Classic observational studies have highlighted the ubiquity …