Explaining Resilience to Peer Influence: The Role of Decision-Making

Abstract

Researchers often discuss deviant peers as if they are a deterministic risk for an adolescent's own delinquency. There is a strong, consistent link between the two, especially in adolescence. Yet, some adolescents act counter to predictions and display resilience to deviant peer influence. Paternoster and Pogarsky’s (2009) concept of thoughtfully reflective decision-making (TRDM) may add to our understanding of resilience to deviant peer exposure; individuals who make slow, deliberate decisions may be more likely to avoid the pitfalls associated with deviant peers, perhaps by selecting out of deviant social networks.

In this dissertation, I use longitudinal data from the PROSPER Peers project in the context of adolescents in rural schools to 1) identify and describe a group of youth that displays resilience to deviant peer influence and 2) investigate whether decision-making skills differentiate those who demonstrate resilience from those who do not. I leverage structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the role of TRDM in fostering resilience to deviant peer influence. Specifically, I test whether TRDM moderates the impact of deviant peer exposure on resilience directly or indirectly, through prompting changes to the adolescents’ social networks. I estimate SEM models that test these relationships using interaction and multigroup models separately for each starting wave.

I find evidence that TRDM promotes resilience to deviant peer influence across waves. My results also provide evidence of a nonlinear interaction between deviant peer exposure and TRDM, whereby TRDM is most protective for adolescents with a high degree (but not entirely) deviant peer group in for analyses starting in 6th or 7th grade. I do not find evidence of a consistent association between TRDM and a change in adolescents’ proportion of deviant peers at the next wave or any partial or full reduction to the direct impact of TRDM on resilience when including this indirect pathway. Thus, I conclude that TRDM does not appear to have an indirect impact on resilience through prompting prosocial change to adolescents’ friend groups. Finally, I discuss the limitations of my study, along with its implications for theory, practice, and future research.