Peer influence, friend selection, and gender: How network processes shape adolescent smoking, drinking, and delinquency

We examine gender differences in the extent to which the social network processes of peer influence and friend selection explain why adolescents tend to exhibit similar risky behaviors as their friends for three problem behaviors (smoking, drinking, and delinquency). Using dynamic Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models (SAOMs), we analyze five waves of data on a large sample of 13,214 adolescents from 51 friendship networks. While both processes explain patterns of risky activities for girls and boys, the delinquent behavior of girls is more susceptible to influence and girls are especially likely to select friends who have similar smoking behaviors to their own.