The Role of School‐Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development
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The Role of School-Related Peers and
Social Networks in Human
Development
CHANDRA MULLER
Abstract
This essay describes the foundational research on peers within schools, the recent
advances in the field, and new challenges and opportunities for future research.
Schools bring together children and youths for many hours of the day over many
years. The intensity of interaction and judgment within of peers within the school
setting heightens the potential impact on human development during the crucial
adolescent years. Extant research on the effects of peers in school cuts across disciplinary lines and is of interest to developmental psychologists, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists, who observe the potential for peers to structure and
reinforce status hierarchies and opportunities to learn, contribute to the development
of personality, identity, interests, and motivation, and shape the cultures that emerge
in schools, all of which may impact students’ learning, educational attainment, and
adult earnings. Social network methods combined with more readily available data
on students’ course taking in schools provides rich and promising new opportunities
for future research.
INTRODUCTION
In modern society, education is a primary institution that teaches skills
and socializes young people to fully participate in our economic, civic, and
political institutions. Schools bring together children and youth of similar
ages into classrooms and grade levels for many hours of the day where
they learn academic, social, and civic skills and are evaluated, assessed,
and judged in relation to peers. The social settings of the classroom and
grade level as well as the curricular material and extracurricular activities
are adapted as youth develop, grow, and gain capacity to handle more
independent and complex academic challenges and social relationships.
Whatever the grade level, the intensity of social interaction and judgment
that students experience may heighten the impact of the hours spent in
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
school on many aspects of development beyond the acquisition of skills to
include personality, interests, values, identity, and motivation.
Schools also provide a hub that defines the social boundaries for the
community of families that are served. Over the course of childhood and
adolescence, students will have logged many hours in classroom and school
settings and even extra hours in extracurricular activities, parent outreach
events, and other opportunities for interaction of peers, friends, and their
families. Through these ongoing and at times intense interactions, the school
can emerge as a venue to define a community, where it takes on a larger role
in the residential neighborhood or other group bound by the commonality
of experiences that emerge from sharing so many hours of the day over the
years of childhood, adolescence, and even early adulthood (for students
attending college). The schools a person attends often to contribute to his or
her identity. In these ways, the social experiences that take place in schools
may reinforce and add an additional dimension to the academic lessons for
students.
Taken together, the school provides opportunities for the emergence
of important and valuable social relationships, norms, obligations and
exchanges of reciprocity that build trust, and shared information, goals,
values, interests, and motivation among peers. The very nature of the
activity that takes place at the school has the potential to uniquely shape
the development of children, adolescents, and young adults, and as such
constitutes an important venue for human development. These roles of peers
within schools are of interest to developmental psychologists, economists,
sociologists, and anthropologists, who observe the potential for peers to
structure and reinforce status hierarchies and opportunities to learn, contribute to the development of personality, identity, interests, and motivation,
and shape the cultures that emerge in schools, all of which may impact
students’ learning, educational attainment, and adult earnings. From the
standpoint of scholars of education and education policy makers, schools
represent a major investment for every developing and developed society.
The potential of peers to either amplify or undermine the investments made
in curriculum, administration, and teachers and other personnel mean that
understanding the role of peers in schools is a priority. This essay describes
the foundational research on peers within schools, the recent advances in
the field, and new challenges and opportunities for future research.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The classical study by Coleman (1961) of 10 northern Illinois high schools
during the second half of the 1950s, The Adolescent Society, provided groundbreaking insights into schools as venues for the emergence of a social
The Role of School-Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development
3
system, each with a unique culture. Coleman observed cultures oriented
toward adolescent rather than adult values and described social subsystems,
or peer groups, where academic success and learning were not valued
and popularity, sports, and being good-looking commanded esteem from
peers; he argued that this adolescent society undermined the purpose of
schools, which was academic. What was especially important was Coleman’s observation that the school boundaries, in time and place, framed
a social world with powerful forces that shaped adolescents’ motivations
and behaviors. Although Coleman’s subsequent work elaborated on the
complexity of factors that contribute to how a school’s social system impacts
students’ achievement—notably the mixture of students’ family racial and
socioeconomic backgrounds (Coleman, 1966), the academic emphasis of
the school (Coleman & Hoffer, 1987), social capital (Coleman, 1988), and
parental involvement (Schneider & Coleman, 1993)—The Adolescent Society
laid a strong theoretical foundation for many subsequent studies of schools
and peer relations by recognizing the importance of the school boundaries as
a frame for adolescent subcultures. Studies of school culture have illustrated
the social side of school of schooling, describing types of social categories
within schools, their origins, and their effects on youth’s development.
An important theoretical distinction in the literature on social categories
among peers in schools is whether or not the social categories are viewed
as a mechanism that reinforces social class inequality in society. In a classical study of British adolescents, Willis (1977) described two groups of boys,
both from working class families, one of which conformed to the demands of
school and the other resisted the exploitation that they experienced at school
and from their position in a stratified society. However, both groups ended
up in working class jobs as adults and differed mainly in their acceptance of
or resistance to the exploitation. Anthropologist Foley (2010) also observed
social reproduction in a school in a small town in south Texas. Focusing on the
school culture that developed around rituals such as Friday football games
and other social activities, Foley showed how the racial divide between white
and Latino students filtered into the every day life and social exchanges in
the school. The way that race was reproduced in the interactions had major
implications for students’ opportunities. Focusing more on social class, linguist Eckert (1989) described two social categories of adolescents within a
high school—the jocks and the burnouts—whose membership was aligned
with the social class background. The jocks came from more socioeconomically privileged families, and Eckert argued that the social categories with
which they identified at school as adolescents reproduced social inequality when they became adults. This happened because the social categories
were accompanied by language and behaviors of the adolescents, who either
bought into or opted out of investing in school. This impacted academic
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
success, which then shaped their opportunities during adulthood and reproduced the social inequality.
In contrast to the social reproduction approach, other studies describe
social categories as a function of extracurricular activities, classroom activities, and the school organization and suggest that an affiliation with the
category has consequences for the student’s life, independent of social
origin. For example, Eder and Kinney (1995) showed that social categories
based on extracurricular activities are linked to students’ popularity; the
activities and categories reinforce gender differences among students and
the link between activities and popularity is stronger for males than females.
Milner (2004) recognized that there are important status differences inherent
in the social categories in high school but argued that they are more complex
than simply rooted in social class or gender characteristics, as some of the
earlier work on adolescent subcultures suggested. Milner recognized the
power of how a school is organized to affect students’ every day activities
and argued that the peer status systems within schools were an attempt to
recapture control over their lives. Ironically, Milner argued, the teen status
systems often had rigid social norms and definitions of youths’ identities,
even linking the identities to consumer-oriented behavior (for example,
valuing one brand of jeans over another), serving to socialize youths into
longer term consumers.
The linkage between the adolescent’s identity formations to a social category is crucial for understanding the formation of peer subgroups in schools
and the resources available to teenagers. Akerlof and Kranton (2002) took
an economic perspective about why adolescents might affiliate with a particular identity, suggesting that adolescents would choose to identify with
a particular social category based on a match between their own perceived
characteristics (for example, a jock, a burnout, or a nerd) and the ideal that
they hold for themselves. As economists, their interest in the affiliation is
the “utility” or what resources are available to the adolescent because of the
affiliation. Identity may shape who is more likely to be friends with the adolescents, what others think of and how they react to him or her, and it also
shapes behavior, for example, how much effort the student is likely to put
into school.
Developmental psychologists use a slightly different approach to explaining why adolescents might identify with some social categories over others,
but arrive at similar conclusions, that identification is a function of personality, activities, often related to gendered notions, and reflects motivations,
interests, and values as well as opportunities for teens to form friendships
more easily. For example, Stone, Barber, and Eccles (2008) found that aptitude in sports, in academics, along with other characteristics of the adolescent (such as their socioeconomic status, appearance, and motivation) all
The Role of School-Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development
5
contribute to predicting their identification with one social category over
another. Understanding these social processes is important because of how
they impact the resources that are available to adolescents as they develop.
The connection between the adolescent’s identity and social category is also
important for understanding possible consequences of peer affiliation. Some
of the same factors that predict an adolescent’s affiliation will also shape his
or her later personality development, curricular and extracurricular participation, academic achievement, and even health behaviors. A key feature
of studies of peer groups is in the recognition of how an affiliation with a
group of individuals with shared characteristics and socially defined categories can impact developmental outcomes beyond what would be expected
through one-on-one relationships among friends. Essentially, the potential of
the group for impacting an individual’s outcomes is more than the sum of its
parts.
One of the most basic potential outcomes from an identification or affiliation with a social category or a group is in the possibility of forming
friendships, as friendships can be an important source of information, help,
and emotional support. Homophily—birds of a feather flocking together,
or the tendency of people to form relationships with others like them—is
a long recognized sociological principle (Blau, 1977; Lazarsfeld & Merton,
1954; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001). The commonality that
draws people together as friends may be based on family characteristics,
such as race or socioeconomic status, or tastes, preferences, or interests, or
shared experiences, such as those in extracurricular activities, grade levels,
or courses taken together. Moreover, these factors combine to produce
opportunity for the formation of friendships. For example, Zeng and Xie
(2008) showed how adolescents formed friendships along racial lines when
they shared grade levels in school. In addition, Epstein (1983) showed
that students formed friendships with other students when they shared
socioeconomic status. Thus, in general, social inequality is reproduced (in
other words, a students’ achievement depends on his or her parents’ status);
however, if the organization of a classroom encouraged social interaction
among students from diverse backgrounds, then students formed relationships between students of different backgrounds and effectively disrupted
the reproduction of social inequality.
The formation of friendships along the lines of shared activities, such as
those based on course taking or extracurricular activities, is interesting for
several reasons. First, this locates the school as a place where interracial
friendships may form and foster more open attitudes about diversity. Second, from a theoretical perspective, it represents an intersection of students’
choices (of friendships, and perhaps interest in the activity), sometimes
referred to as individual agency, and the structure of the opportunities to
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
participate in the activity. Schools themselves provide this type of structured
opportunity for adolescents to form friendships at school. Most of the empirical work on friendships, peers, and schools has focused on adolescents in
high school or middle school because adolescents tend to have a heightened
awareness of and sensitivity to their social worlds. However, others have
concentrated on school structured activities and friendship formation at
the elementary school level, such as through ability grouping (Hallinan &
Sørensen, 1985), or on college campuses in dormitories (T. Stinebrickner &
T. R. Stinebrickner, 2006).
Whatever the age group of the students, the ways that schools structure
opportunities for friendships to develop and be maintained is important for
human development and the long run opportunities that schools provide for
students to succeed or fail. These opportunities are often structured to bring
together students, for example through extracurricular activities or courses
taken together by students who have similar interests or something else in
common, sometimes referred to as peers. These peer groups can then reinforce
differences within the larger student body and through different access to
social resources.
Just as students may choose their friends differently depending on how
opportunities to interact are organized, there are other effects of peers and
the contexts in which the friendships may form, as well. Friendships and settings that include potential friends not only have implications for students’
identity development and friendship formation, as described earlier, but they
may also have instrumental utility. More specifically, these settings tend to
foster a normative climate whereby students are encouraged to exert more or
less effort in school may help one another with homework or provide emotional support, share useful information, or help to define how teachers and
other school personnel evaluate a student.
Through encouraging some behaviors over others, the peer groups may
have influence beyond academic behavior. Peers have known effects on
health-related behaviors such as smoking, drinking, mental health, or
weight control, and civic and political participation. For example, sociologists Wilkinson and Pearson (2009) found that a heteronormative culture in
high schools, which was heightened through a culture where football and
religion have a larger presence and are more highly valued, had a negative
impact on the emotional well-being, fighting, and academic failure of
youth who were same-sex attracted rather than heterosexual in their sexual
attraction. In other words, the norms that pressure adolescents to fit into the
local school culture have far reaching implications for their development.
Although generally speaking, family background resources, such as parents’
level of education, tend to give some students academic advantages over
The Role of School-Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development
7
others, these peer settings may provide alternative resources for some
students to get ahead or others to fall behind.
NEW DIRECTIONS IN RESEARCH
We know that peers and school contexts influence human development in
important ways, in large part because people are fundamentally social in
nature. Yet, measurement of these processes is challenging for a number of
reasons. First, people select into the contexts that they also are influenced
by, making it difficult to know whether an individual’s predisposition or the
context itself accounts for any particular outcome. If one cannot identify the
direction of a relationship, then it is impossible to know whether it is causal.
Second, measuring the effects of peers, social networks of friends, and
other contexts within a school is difficult because it requires identifying
and defining the relevant group to measure. As we have seen from the
foundational research described earlier, some scholars have used identification with a social category or a racial and ethnic, gender or some other
characteristic to define peers, and others have used a structural feature of a
school such as a grade level, an ability group, an extracurricular activity, or
college dormitory to predict the peer group that contributes to the formation
of friendships or other peer group effects. These social categories that reflect
and shape an adolescents’ identity may be defined through self-reported
identification (such as a student might report on a questionnaire), through
participation in activities such as extracurricular sports or another club or
through social network affiliation.
Activities structured by schools, such as extracurricular activities and
even grade levels, not only define the students’ identities but also shape
their access to resources. Social network approaches have long been used
to identify groups or cliques of friends and provide an alternative way to
define and estimate peer groups. Recently, network approaches have been
used to identify clusters of courses taken by students within a school (Frank
et al., 2008) and likely structure students’ opportunities for social interaction,
both in and out of school over the years. This network methodology offers a
way to estimate the effects of the group on adolescents’ academic and social
behavior and well-being.
All of these settings provide venues for coming in contact with potential
friends. Potential friends may be even more influential than friends; a friend
is a known resource but resources from a potential friend are uncertain. Consequently, the adolescent may try even harder to conform to the norms in an
attempt to earn a new friendship from a pool of potential friends (Giordano,
2003). The size and character of the group is also an important consideration when thinking about the effects of peers because these factors have
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
implications for the type of social interactions that emerge. For example, an
entire school or grade level has cultures and rituals that may exert normative influences but may be too large to affect all students in the same way
because students also perceive differences among members of such a large
group. The clusters of students taking courses together, based on the network approach described earlier, represent an important advance in the field
because they can be defined empirically and uniquely for every school. They
likely capture how students spend their time across sets of classrooms and
also pinpoint the students with greater chances of coming in contact with one
another between classes and when studying. In this way, the clusters measure
something about students’ authentic experiences in schools.
KEY ISSUES FOR THE FUTURE
It is important to recognize that students may have more than one affiliation and therefore may be subject to multiple contextual influences of peers.
This might happen if students are very involved in extracurricular activities or activities in another setting. Similarly, as students progress through
their years in school, from freshman through the senior year of high school,
they likely experience several distinct peer groups and contexts. Furthermore, some students may transfer between schools, and such a move would
likely dramatically alter peer groups. The influence of these multiple contexts, either through concurrent membership or because of consecutive affiliation, is a key area of future research. Without proper measurement of the
multiple contexts, the estimation of any particular context effect might be
inaccurate. Beyond measurement, it is important to have a theoretical reason
for estimating the effect of a peer affiliation, social network, or other context
on human development as the theory helps to ensure that an estimated effect
is not due to random chance.
Overall, we know that school peer groups and the social networks that
form within schools have the potential to exert powerful forces on the development of children, adolescents, and young adults. Some of these groups
come about because people who share similar characteristics (for example,
their racial or ethnic identity) are more likely to affiliate with one another.
However, other groups are formed through shared activities and experiences.
These opportunities to participate in activities and courses are structured by
school administrators and have implications for the social networks that students develop. Importantly, they have a substantial impact on human development and opportunities that have long run effects. We currently have very
little systematic knowledge about how opportunity structures contribute to
the emergence of productive social networks. This is an important issue for
the future.
The Role of School-Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development
9
REFERENCES
Akerlof, G. A., & Kranton, R. E. (2002). Identity and schooling: Some lessons for the
economics of education. [article]. Journal of Economic Literature, 40(4), 1167–1201.
Blau, P. M. (1977). Inequality and heterogeneity: A primitive theory of social structure. New
York, NY: Free Press.
Coleman, J. S. (1961). The adolescent society: The social life of the teenager and its impact
on education. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Coleman, J. S. (1966). Equality of educational opportunity. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education.
Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal
of Sociology, 94(Supplement), S95–S120.
Coleman, J. S., & Hoffer, T. (1987). Public and private high schools: The impact of communities. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in high school. New
York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Eder, D., & Kinney, D. A. (1995). The effect of middle school extra curricular activities
on adolescents’ popularity and peer status. Youth & Society, 26(3), 298–324.
Epstein, J. L. (1983). Selection of friends in differently organized schools and classrooms. In J. L. Epstein & N. Karweit (Eds.), Friends in school: Patterns of selection and
influence in secondary schools. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Foley, D. E. (2010). Learning capitalist culture: Deep in the heart of Tejas (2nd ed.).
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Frank, K., Muller, C., Schiller, K., Riegle-Crumb, C., Mueller, A. S., Crosnoe, R.,
& Pearson, J. (2008). The social dynamics of mathematics course taking in high
school. American Journal of Sociology, 113(6), 1645–1696.
Giordano, P. C. (2003). Relationships in adolescence. Annual Review of Sociology, 29,
257–281.
Hallinan, M. T., & Sørensen, A. B. (1985). Ability grouping and student friendships.
American Educational Research Journal, 22(4), 485–499.
Lazarsfeld, P. F., & Merton, R. K. (1954). Friendship as a social process: A substantive
and methodological analysis. In B. Morroe, T. Abel & C. Page (Eds.), Freedom and
control in modern society (pp. 18–66). New York, NY: Van Nostrand.
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily
in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 415–444.
Milner, M. (2004). Freaks, geeks, and cool kids: American teenagers, schools, and the culture
of consumption. New York, NY: Routledge.
Schneider, B., & Coleman, J. S. (1993). Parents, their children, and schools. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Stinebrickner, R., & Stinebrickner, T. R. (2006). What can be learned about peer effects
using college roommates? Evidence from new survey data and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Journal of Public Economics, 90(8–9), 1435–1454.
Stone, M. R., Barber, B. L., & Eccles, J. S. (2008). We knew them when: Sixth grade
characteristics that predict adolescent high school social identities. The Journal of
Early Adolescence, 28(2), 304–328.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Wilkinson, L., & Pearson, J. (2009). School culture and the well-being of same-sexattracted youth. Gender & Society, 23(4), 542–568.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New
York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Zeng, Z., & Xie, Y. (2008). A preference-opportunity-choice framework with applications to intergroup friendship. American Journal of Sociology, 114(3), 615–648.
CHANDRA MULLER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Chandra Muller is Alma Cowden Madden Professor in the sociology
department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is on how
schools, including the contexts within schools, shape educational attainment, and other life course outcomes, such as work and health. Of primary
interest is disparities in school experiences according to gender, race and
ethnicity, social class, and disability, immigration, or language minority
status. One area of focus is on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and
math) preparation and careers. In addition, her 2013 book, Coming of Political
Age: American Schools and the Civic Development of Immigrant Youth, with
Rebecca Callahan, investigated the effects of education on civic outcomes.
Currently, she is the principal investigator, with co-investigators Sandra
Black, Eric Grodsky, and John Robert Warren, of a study that is following up
High School and Beyond sample members, who are now around 50 years old,
to study the long-term effects of education.
RELATED ESSAYS
Economics of Early Education (Economics), W. Steven Barnett
Neighborhoods and Cognitive Development (Psychology), Jondou Chen and
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Genetics and the Life Course (Sociology), Evan Charney
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske
and Cydney H. Dupree
State of the Art in Competition Research (Psychology), Márta Fülöp and
Gábor Orosz
Social Class and Parental Investment in Children (Sociology), Anne H.
Gauthier
Changing Family Patterns (Sociology), Kathleen Gerson and Stacy Torres
Language and Thought (Psychology), Susan Goldin-Meadow
Family Relationships and Development (Psychology), Joan E. Grusec
An Evolutionary Perspective on Developmental Plasticity (Psychology),
Sarah Hartman and Jay Belsky
Childhood (Anthropology), Karen L. Kramer
The Role of School-Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development
11
Two-Systems View of Children’s Theory-of-Mind Understanding (Psychology), Jason Low
Neural and Cognitive Plasticity (Psychology), Eduardo Mercado III
A Bio-Social-Cultural Approach to Early Cognitive Development: Entering
the Community of Minds (Psychology), Katherine Nelson
How Form Constrains Function in the Human Brain (Psychology), Timothy
D. Verstynen
Theory of Mind (Psychology), Henry Wellman
-
The Role of School-Related Peers and
Social Networks in Human
Development
CHANDRA MULLER
Abstract
This essay describes the foundational research on peers within schools, the recent
advances in the field, and new challenges and opportunities for future research.
Schools bring together children and youths for many hours of the day over many
years. The intensity of interaction and judgment within of peers within the school
setting heightens the potential impact on human development during the crucial
adolescent years. Extant research on the effects of peers in school cuts across disciplinary lines and is of interest to developmental psychologists, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists, who observe the potential for peers to structure and
reinforce status hierarchies and opportunities to learn, contribute to the development
of personality, identity, interests, and motivation, and shape the cultures that emerge
in schools, all of which may impact students’ learning, educational attainment, and
adult earnings. Social network methods combined with more readily available data
on students’ course taking in schools provides rich and promising new opportunities
for future research.
INTRODUCTION
In modern society, education is a primary institution that teaches skills
and socializes young people to fully participate in our economic, civic, and
political institutions. Schools bring together children and youth of similar
ages into classrooms and grade levels for many hours of the day where
they learn academic, social, and civic skills and are evaluated, assessed,
and judged in relation to peers. The social settings of the classroom and
grade level as well as the curricular material and extracurricular activities
are adapted as youth develop, grow, and gain capacity to handle more
independent and complex academic challenges and social relationships.
Whatever the grade level, the intensity of social interaction and judgment
that students experience may heighten the impact of the hours spent in
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
school on many aspects of development beyond the acquisition of skills to
include personality, interests, values, identity, and motivation.
Schools also provide a hub that defines the social boundaries for the
community of families that are served. Over the course of childhood and
adolescence, students will have logged many hours in classroom and school
settings and even extra hours in extracurricular activities, parent outreach
events, and other opportunities for interaction of peers, friends, and their
families. Through these ongoing and at times intense interactions, the school
can emerge as a venue to define a community, where it takes on a larger role
in the residential neighborhood or other group bound by the commonality
of experiences that emerge from sharing so many hours of the day over the
years of childhood, adolescence, and even early adulthood (for students
attending college). The schools a person attends often to contribute to his or
her identity. In these ways, the social experiences that take place in schools
may reinforce and add an additional dimension to the academic lessons for
students.
Taken together, the school provides opportunities for the emergence
of important and valuable social relationships, norms, obligations and
exchanges of reciprocity that build trust, and shared information, goals,
values, interests, and motivation among peers. The very nature of the
activity that takes place at the school has the potential to uniquely shape
the development of children, adolescents, and young adults, and as such
constitutes an important venue for human development. These roles of peers
within schools are of interest to developmental psychologists, economists,
sociologists, and anthropologists, who observe the potential for peers to
structure and reinforce status hierarchies and opportunities to learn, contribute to the development of personality, identity, interests, and motivation,
and shape the cultures that emerge in schools, all of which may impact
students’ learning, educational attainment, and adult earnings. From the
standpoint of scholars of education and education policy makers, schools
represent a major investment for every developing and developed society.
The potential of peers to either amplify or undermine the investments made
in curriculum, administration, and teachers and other personnel mean that
understanding the role of peers in schools is a priority. This essay describes
the foundational research on peers within schools, the recent advances in
the field, and new challenges and opportunities for future research.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The classical study by Coleman (1961) of 10 northern Illinois high schools
during the second half of the 1950s, The Adolescent Society, provided groundbreaking insights into schools as venues for the emergence of a social
The Role of School-Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development
3
system, each with a unique culture. Coleman observed cultures oriented
toward adolescent rather than adult values and described social subsystems,
or peer groups, where academic success and learning were not valued
and popularity, sports, and being good-looking commanded esteem from
peers; he argued that this adolescent society undermined the purpose of
schools, which was academic. What was especially important was Coleman’s observation that the school boundaries, in time and place, framed
a social world with powerful forces that shaped adolescents’ motivations
and behaviors. Although Coleman’s subsequent work elaborated on the
complexity of factors that contribute to how a school’s social system impacts
students’ achievement—notably the mixture of students’ family racial and
socioeconomic backgrounds (Coleman, 1966), the academic emphasis of
the school (Coleman & Hoffer, 1987), social capital (Coleman, 1988), and
parental involvement (Schneider & Coleman, 1993)—The Adolescent Society
laid a strong theoretical foundation for many subsequent studies of schools
and peer relations by recognizing the importance of the school boundaries as
a frame for adolescent subcultures. Studies of school culture have illustrated
the social side of school of schooling, describing types of social categories
within schools, their origins, and their effects on youth’s development.
An important theoretical distinction in the literature on social categories
among peers in schools is whether or not the social categories are viewed
as a mechanism that reinforces social class inequality in society. In a classical study of British adolescents, Willis (1977) described two groups of boys,
both from working class families, one of which conformed to the demands of
school and the other resisted the exploitation that they experienced at school
and from their position in a stratified society. However, both groups ended
up in working class jobs as adults and differed mainly in their acceptance of
or resistance to the exploitation. Anthropologist Foley (2010) also observed
social reproduction in a school in a small town in south Texas. Focusing on the
school culture that developed around rituals such as Friday football games
and other social activities, Foley showed how the racial divide between white
and Latino students filtered into the every day life and social exchanges in
the school. The way that race was reproduced in the interactions had major
implications for students’ opportunities. Focusing more on social class, linguist Eckert (1989) described two social categories of adolescents within a
high school—the jocks and the burnouts—whose membership was aligned
with the social class background. The jocks came from more socioeconomically privileged families, and Eckert argued that the social categories with
which they identified at school as adolescents reproduced social inequality when they became adults. This happened because the social categories
were accompanied by language and behaviors of the adolescents, who either
bought into or opted out of investing in school. This impacted academic
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
success, which then shaped their opportunities during adulthood and reproduced the social inequality.
In contrast to the social reproduction approach, other studies describe
social categories as a function of extracurricular activities, classroom activities, and the school organization and suggest that an affiliation with the
category has consequences for the student’s life, independent of social
origin. For example, Eder and Kinney (1995) showed that social categories
based on extracurricular activities are linked to students’ popularity; the
activities and categories reinforce gender differences among students and
the link between activities and popularity is stronger for males than females.
Milner (2004) recognized that there are important status differences inherent
in the social categories in high school but argued that they are more complex
than simply rooted in social class or gender characteristics, as some of the
earlier work on adolescent subcultures suggested. Milner recognized the
power of how a school is organized to affect students’ every day activities
and argued that the peer status systems within schools were an attempt to
recapture control over their lives. Ironically, Milner argued, the teen status
systems often had rigid social norms and definitions of youths’ identities,
even linking the identities to consumer-oriented behavior (for example,
valuing one brand of jeans over another), serving to socialize youths into
longer term consumers.
The linkage between the adolescent’s identity formations to a social category is crucial for understanding the formation of peer subgroups in schools
and the resources available to teenagers. Akerlof and Kranton (2002) took
an economic perspective about why adolescents might affiliate with a particular identity, suggesting that adolescents would choose to identify with
a particular social category based on a match between their own perceived
characteristics (for example, a jock, a burnout, or a nerd) and the ideal that
they hold for themselves. As economists, their interest in the affiliation is
the “utility” or what resources are available to the adolescent because of the
affiliation. Identity may shape who is more likely to be friends with the adolescents, what others think of and how they react to him or her, and it also
shapes behavior, for example, how much effort the student is likely to put
into school.
Developmental psychologists use a slightly different approach to explaining why adolescents might identify with some social categories over others,
but arrive at similar conclusions, that identification is a function of personality, activities, often related to gendered notions, and reflects motivations,
interests, and values as well as opportunities for teens to form friendships
more easily. For example, Stone, Barber, and Eccles (2008) found that aptitude in sports, in academics, along with other characteristics of the adolescent (such as their socioeconomic status, appearance, and motivation) all
The Role of School-Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development
5
contribute to predicting their identification with one social category over
another. Understanding these social processes is important because of how
they impact the resources that are available to adolescents as they develop.
The connection between the adolescent’s identity and social category is also
important for understanding possible consequences of peer affiliation. Some
of the same factors that predict an adolescent’s affiliation will also shape his
or her later personality development, curricular and extracurricular participation, academic achievement, and even health behaviors. A key feature
of studies of peer groups is in the recognition of how an affiliation with a
group of individuals with shared characteristics and socially defined categories can impact developmental outcomes beyond what would be expected
through one-on-one relationships among friends. Essentially, the potential of
the group for impacting an individual’s outcomes is more than the sum of its
parts.
One of the most basic potential outcomes from an identification or affiliation with a social category or a group is in the possibility of forming
friendships, as friendships can be an important source of information, help,
and emotional support. Homophily—birds of a feather flocking together,
or the tendency of people to form relationships with others like them—is
a long recognized sociological principle (Blau, 1977; Lazarsfeld & Merton,
1954; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001). The commonality that
draws people together as friends may be based on family characteristics,
such as race or socioeconomic status, or tastes, preferences, or interests, or
shared experiences, such as those in extracurricular activities, grade levels,
or courses taken together. Moreover, these factors combine to produce
opportunity for the formation of friendships. For example, Zeng and Xie
(2008) showed how adolescents formed friendships along racial lines when
they shared grade levels in school. In addition, Epstein (1983) showed
that students formed friendships with other students when they shared
socioeconomic status. Thus, in general, social inequality is reproduced (in
other words, a students’ achievement depends on his or her parents’ status);
however, if the organization of a classroom encouraged social interaction
among students from diverse backgrounds, then students formed relationships between students of different backgrounds and effectively disrupted
the reproduction of social inequality.
The formation of friendships along the lines of shared activities, such as
those based on course taking or extracurricular activities, is interesting for
several reasons. First, this locates the school as a place where interracial
friendships may form and foster more open attitudes about diversity. Second, from a theoretical perspective, it represents an intersection of students’
choices (of friendships, and perhaps interest in the activity), sometimes
referred to as individual agency, and the structure of the opportunities to
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
participate in the activity. Schools themselves provide this type of structured
opportunity for adolescents to form friendships at school. Most of the empirical work on friendships, peers, and schools has focused on adolescents in
high school or middle school because adolescents tend to have a heightened
awareness of and sensitivity to their social worlds. However, others have
concentrated on school structured activities and friendship formation at
the elementary school level, such as through ability grouping (Hallinan &
Sørensen, 1985), or on college campuses in dormitories (T. Stinebrickner &
T. R. Stinebrickner, 2006).
Whatever the age group of the students, the ways that schools structure
opportunities for friendships to develop and be maintained is important for
human development and the long run opportunities that schools provide for
students to succeed or fail. These opportunities are often structured to bring
together students, for example through extracurricular activities or courses
taken together by students who have similar interests or something else in
common, sometimes referred to as peers. These peer groups can then reinforce
differences within the larger student body and through different access to
social resources.
Just as students may choose their friends differently depending on how
opportunities to interact are organized, there are other effects of peers and
the contexts in which the friendships may form, as well. Friendships and settings that include potential friends not only have implications for students’
identity development and friendship formation, as described earlier, but they
may also have instrumental utility. More specifically, these settings tend to
foster a normative climate whereby students are encouraged to exert more or
less effort in school may help one another with homework or provide emotional support, share useful information, or help to define how teachers and
other school personnel evaluate a student.
Through encouraging some behaviors over others, the peer groups may
have influence beyond academic behavior. Peers have known effects on
health-related behaviors such as smoking, drinking, mental health, or
weight control, and civic and political participation. For example, sociologists Wilkinson and Pearson (2009) found that a heteronormative culture in
high schools, which was heightened through a culture where football and
religion have a larger presence and are more highly valued, had a negative
impact on the emotional well-being, fighting, and academic failure of
youth who were same-sex attracted rather than heterosexual in their sexual
attraction. In other words, the norms that pressure adolescents to fit into the
local school culture have far reaching implications for their development.
Although generally speaking, family background resources, such as parents’
level of education, tend to give some students academic advantages over
The Role of School-Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development
7
others, these peer settings may provide alternative resources for some
students to get ahead or others to fall behind.
NEW DIRECTIONS IN RESEARCH
We know that peers and school contexts influence human development in
important ways, in large part because people are fundamentally social in
nature. Yet, measurement of these processes is challenging for a number of
reasons. First, people select into the contexts that they also are influenced
by, making it difficult to know whether an individual’s predisposition or the
context itself accounts for any particular outcome. If one cannot identify the
direction of a relationship, then it is impossible to know whether it is causal.
Second, measuring the effects of peers, social networks of friends, and
other contexts within a school is difficult because it requires identifying
and defining the relevant group to measure. As we have seen from the
foundational research described earlier, some scholars have used identification with a social category or a racial and ethnic, gender or some other
characteristic to define peers, and others have used a structural feature of a
school such as a grade level, an ability group, an extracurricular activity, or
college dormitory to predict the peer group that contributes to the formation
of friendships or other peer group effects. These social categories that reflect
and shape an adolescents’ identity may be defined through self-reported
identification (such as a student might report on a questionnaire), through
participation in activities such as extracurricular sports or another club or
through social network affiliation.
Activities structured by schools, such as extracurricular activities and
even grade levels, not only define the students’ identities but also shape
their access to resources. Social network approaches have long been used
to identify groups or cliques of friends and provide an alternative way to
define and estimate peer groups. Recently, network approaches have been
used to identify clusters of courses taken by students within a school (Frank
et al., 2008) and likely structure students’ opportunities for social interaction,
both in and out of school over the years. This network methodology offers a
way to estimate the effects of the group on adolescents’ academic and social
behavior and well-being.
All of these settings provide venues for coming in contact with potential
friends. Potential friends may be even more influential than friends; a friend
is a known resource but resources from a potential friend are uncertain. Consequently, the adolescent may try even harder to conform to the norms in an
attempt to earn a new friendship from a pool of potential friends (Giordano,
2003). The size and character of the group is also an important consideration when thinking about the effects of peers because these factors have
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
implications for the type of social interactions that emerge. For example, an
entire school or grade level has cultures and rituals that may exert normative influences but may be too large to affect all students in the same way
because students also perceive differences among members of such a large
group. The clusters of students taking courses together, based on the network approach described earlier, represent an important advance in the field
because they can be defined empirically and uniquely for every school. They
likely capture how students spend their time across sets of classrooms and
also pinpoint the students with greater chances of coming in contact with one
another between classes and when studying. In this way, the clusters measure
something about students’ authentic experiences in schools.
KEY ISSUES FOR THE FUTURE
It is important to recognize that students may have more than one affiliation and therefore may be subject to multiple contextual influences of peers.
This might happen if students are very involved in extracurricular activities or activities in another setting. Similarly, as students progress through
their years in school, from freshman through the senior year of high school,
they likely experience several distinct peer groups and contexts. Furthermore, some students may transfer between schools, and such a move would
likely dramatically alter peer groups. The influence of these multiple contexts, either through concurrent membership or because of consecutive affiliation, is a key area of future research. Without proper measurement of the
multiple contexts, the estimation of any particular context effect might be
inaccurate. Beyond measurement, it is important to have a theoretical reason
for estimating the effect of a peer affiliation, social network, or other context
on human development as the theory helps to ensure that an estimated effect
is not due to random chance.
Overall, we know that school peer groups and the social networks that
form within schools have the potential to exert powerful forces on the development of children, adolescents, and young adults. Some of these groups
come about because people who share similar characteristics (for example,
their racial or ethnic identity) are more likely to affiliate with one another.
However, other groups are formed through shared activities and experiences.
These opportunities to participate in activities and courses are structured by
school administrators and have implications for the social networks that students develop. Importantly, they have a substantial impact on human development and opportunities that have long run effects. We currently have very
little systematic knowledge about how opportunity structures contribute to
the emergence of productive social networks. This is an important issue for
the future.
The Role of School-Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development
9
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Wilkinson, L., & Pearson, J. (2009). School culture and the well-being of same-sexattracted youth. Gender & Society, 23(4), 542–568.
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CHANDRA MULLER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Chandra Muller is Alma Cowden Madden Professor in the sociology
department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is on how
schools, including the contexts within schools, shape educational attainment, and other life course outcomes, such as work and health. Of primary
interest is disparities in school experiences according to gender, race and
ethnicity, social class, and disability, immigration, or language minority
status. One area of focus is on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and
math) preparation and careers. In addition, her 2013 book, Coming of Political
Age: American Schools and the Civic Development of Immigrant Youth, with
Rebecca Callahan, investigated the effects of education on civic outcomes.
Currently, she is the principal investigator, with co-investigators Sandra
Black, Eric Grodsky, and John Robert Warren, of a study that is following up
High School and Beyond sample members, who are now around 50 years old,
to study the long-term effects of education.
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