Brett Laursen - US grants

Affiliates tend to be similar on key attributes. This phenomenon, known as homophily, is of particular interest during adolescence because of concerns that friends and romantic partners promote maladaptive behaviors and interfere with academic achievement at a time when youth are especially susceptible to peer influence. Such claims have been sharply criticized, however, for overstating peer socialization effects and ignoring the fact that youth tend to select peers who resemble themselves as friends and romantic partners. Progress reconciling these dissonant views has been slowed by the significant methodological challenges posed by the nonindependent data characteristic of participants in close relationships (i.e., mutual influence between partners that makes them more similar to one another than to random others but that also biases statistical analyses). As a result, scientific understanding of similarity between close peers is incomplete and there is almost no empirical evidence describing which individuals are most apt to change to increase their similarity with friends and romantic partners. The project utilizes archival data from two longitudinal projects: (a) the 10 to 18 Project, a 5-year community study of all students enrolled in the 4th through the 12th grade in a small city in central Sweden; and (b) Project STAR, a 5-year study of friend and romantic relationships in Denver youth ages 14 to 19. These studies contain complementary information about homophily that encompasses a variety of educational outcomes and factors known to constrain educational achievement. The project has two objectives: (a) specify selection and socialization effects in domains that reflect learning and in contexts that constrain learning, and (b) identify characteristics of youth who are susceptible to influence from friends and romantic partners. To meet these objectives, new analytic techniques that measure homophily will be devised and refined. Analytic strategies designed for nonindependent data will estimate selection and socialization over time, disentangling partner influence from individual stability.

The project will have a profound impact on the scientific study of peer relationships and, more generally, on assumptions about the influence of peers over academic achievement and adjustment. In terms of impact on the scientific community, the dyadic data analytic techniques devised to assess homophily will set a new methodological standard for research on the topic, rendering obsolete past empirical practices and revising the conventional wisdom about peer influence over development. In terms of impact on adolescent learning and contexts that constrain it, the project will lay the groundwork for advances in education and public health. Current efforts to promote academic achievement and curb deviant peer influences assume a model in which relationship participants are mutually influential. School curricula, instructional activities, and peer interventions will be more effective if influence agents are distinguished from influence recipients, with programs specifically crafted for each.

This study aims to improve educational practices by filling critical gaps in research on the impact of relationships on mathematics achievement for Latino students. The study has two main objectives: First, the PIs will use longitudinal data and advanced statistical approaches to understand factors that influence mathematics attitudes and achievement during the transition from elementary to middle school. Second, the PIs will apply the expectancy-value model to the prediction of mathematics behavior and performance. Surveys will be collected from 300 Latino mothers, students, and their math teachers near the end of 5th grade, at the beginning and end of 6th grade, and at the beginning of 7th grade.

The intellectual merit is its potential to advance understanding of how and why interest in mathematics develops or declines over time, and how parents and teachers respond to these changes. The work will address broader impacts and benefit society by contributing to the body of literature concerning Latino students in STEM and has the potential to influence both parental behaviors and teaching practices as they relate to underrepresented populations. A graduate student will be trained to develop and apply analytic tools for interdependent data to STEM education content, helping to address the critical shortage of quantitative methodologists. The findings will be disseminated to researchers, teachers, parent and teacher educators, and parents.

This interdisciplinary research project will investigate the development of children's social networks using real-time observations of classroom behavior. Continuous measurement of children's movements in the classroom will be complemented with automated analyses of audio recordings and human descriptions of social contacts. Children will be followed from toddler through pre-school to pre-kindergarten in order to conduct a longitudinal investigation of the origin and development of their social networks. Interactions will be observed across classroom activities and will include teachers, allowing for a comprehensive model of classroom ecology and gender segregation patterns. The project will enhance understanding about the micro-geography of educational practice to determine how student location is distributed with respect to the pedagogic structuring of classroom space, such as which children visit the book area together. The findings will provide a knowledge base designed to address deficits in school engagement that characterize the ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged students who will be participating in the project. Project resources and de-identified data will be disseminated to the research community to facilitate additional discovery.

This project will unite network scientists from physics with developmental and school psychologists to investigate the development and dynamic functioning of social networks. Quantitative network models of social dynamics will be infused with information about the role that child characteristics like gender and ethnicity play in the formation of classroom social groups. Agent-based modeling will synthesize movement and social contact dynamics. Network models will be parameterized with fission-fusion equations to predict changes in children's developing social networks such as the size and gender composition of groups of interacting children. Multilevel models will capture within- and between- year longitudinal changes in sociality for individual children and for the network overall. These complementary models will specify the processes through which children's social groups become progressively larger and more interconnected over development. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.

Project Summary The goal of the proposed project is to identify risk factors for and maladaptive consequences of friendship dissolution, and, thereby, bolster the scientific foundation undergirding efforts to improve the lives of children with peer difficulties. Children suffer in the absence of friends. How and why children?s friendships end is not well understood, however. Equally unclear are the effects of friendship dissolution and the circumstances in which it threatens well-being. The proposed project is a multi-informant, cohort- sequential longitudinal study of individual differences in friendship loss. Students attending diverse public schools in South Florida will be followed as they navigate the challenging transition from primary school to middle school. Peers, teachers, and children in Grades 3-5 (at the outset) will complete measures describing friendships and individual adjustment 3 times per academic year at 12 week intervals (8 times across 2.5 years). An innovative cohort-sequential design assessing change during an academic year (within grades) and from one year to the next (between grades and between schools) will set the stage for a new generation of analyses that disentangle the causes of friendship instability from the effects. The first specific aim of the proposed project is to identify the antecedents of friendship dissolution. The proposed study will provide the first-ever depiction of factors that predict friendship instability across the transition into middle school, a time when friendship participation foreshadows later social and academic success. Multi-wave assessments will be deployed to determine whether friendships dissolve because of incompatibility arising from differences between partners or because one or both partners possess undesirable attributes that undermine the affiliation. Full longitudinal mediation models will compare competing hypotheses concerning relationship deterioration as an intermediary process: One traces friendship dissolution through heightened conflict, the other through declining feelings of security and support. The second specific aim of the proposed project is to describe the adjustment consequences of friendship dissolution. Hidden among the majority of children who successfully weather friendship transitions are subgroups whose risk for maladjustment dramatically increases with the loss of a friend. The quasi-experimental design (contrasting children who remain friended or friendless over time with friended children who become friendless and friendless children who acquire friends) will offer the strongest possible test of the hypothesis that changes in friendship participation are responsible for subsequent changes in individual well-being. Friendlessness is expected to amplify the ill effects of rejection, because children with peer difficulties possess attributes that make it difficult to form new friendships. Strong repercussive after-effects should also follow the dissolution of long-term, high quality friendships with well-adjusted partners. The proposed project is noteworthy for the novel application of analytic strategies to yield new insights into the correlates and consequences of friendship instability.