Friendship Networks and Socioeconomic Outcomes

Children who grow up in disadvantaged environments face substantial barriers to educational and economic success later in life. However, research has long shown that disadvantaged youth are influenced by their peers and benefit from interacting with children who come from different social and economic backgrounds. This project will study the conditions that promote friendships that cross socioeconomic boundaries among school children, and the implications of friendship patterns for longer-term educational achievement and economic success.

The study will consider: Do the attributes that help children overcome disadvantaged backgrounds also promote friendships across socio-economic boundaries, and do these friendships in turn have a lasting impact on life trajectories? Findings from the study will help decision-makers to identify pathways that help youth from disadvantaged backgrounds to find greater economic success as adults.

This study will investigate the friendship networks of disadvantaged youth and their effects using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally representative longitudinal study of over 20,000 adolescents. The study will use a combination of simulation analysis and network analysis to study how friendships that cross-socioeconomic boundaries shape longer-term educational, income, and occupational outcomes.

One key contribution of the study will be a better understanding of why and how student and peer outcomes are related. The study aims to disentangle three kinds of influence: direct effects of students’ friendships, indirect or “ripple effects” on other students, and contextual effects of neighborhood and school composition. The study will contribute to sociological theories of stratification, social network analysis, and statistical research on endogeneity.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.