FORWARD THINKING: PREPARING OUR YOUTH FOR THE COMING WORLD OCTOBER 24 - 25, 2011

1. Changing Contexts and Moving Targets: Assessing Positive Peer Influences on Mental Health Across Developmental Transitions FORWARD THINKING: PREPARING OUR YOUTH FOR THE COMING WORLD OCTOBER 24 - 25, 2011  University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia Bonnie Leadbeater, Jacqueline Homel, Kara Thompson and PaweenaSukhawathanakul

2. Positive Peer Influences in Childhood • The quality of peer relationships in early childhood is associated with: • Greater levels of well-being (Holder & Coleman, 2009); • Lower levels of peer victimization (Ladd, 2006); • Greater school engagement (Perdue, et al. 2009)

3. Positive Peer Influences in Adolescents on • Psychological adjustment (Hirsch & DuBois) • School engagement (Li, Lerner) • Civic engagement and volunteering (Youniss, Flanagan ) • Emotional distress (Newcomb & Bentler, Allen) • Substance use and delinquency (Prinstein & Boergers, Allen & Antonishak, Catalano, Hawkins, etc.) • Driving (Brown)

4. Assessing Positive Peer Influences • Often assessed as individual traits • Friendship quality, • Reciprocated “best” friends • Emotional or social support, • Sociomemetric status (accepted, liked) • or the absence of associations with negative peer activities

5. Assessment is complicated in longitudinal studies • Peer influences are broader than close friendships, • Peer networks change (often frequently) over time • Changes in contexts fuel changes in peer networks • Annual classroom re-organizations • School transitions: elementary to middle school create larger peer networks • Shifts in interest (giving up band for shop, joining a team) • Family moves • Developmental transitions (e. g. late adolescence to early adulthood) • Starting romantic relationships (often short term)

6. Outline: To open discussion • I am going to BRIEFLY present two of our efforts to conceptualize peer influences over time: 1. A study of individual and classroom effects of social competence and social responsibility in first to third grade students 2. A study of emotional support and positive peer activities in a sample of youth 12 to 18 whom we have followed for 6 years across the transition to young adulthood .

7. Study 1: Children in grades 1 to 3 • With the elementary school children, we assessed the mediating effects of individual and classroom levels of variables at the intersection of individual and peer relationships: Social competence and Social responsibility and their effects as mediators of the relationship between peer victimization and internalizing or aggression

8. A WITS Program Evaluation Sample (www.witsprogram.ca)

9. Measures: Its all about interactions Physical and Relational Victimization: Child Report: Social Experience Questionnaire Social Responsibility: Teacher Ratings • “Is friendly, caring, & helpful to others”; “Helps solve peer conflicts” Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC) Parent ratings • Aggression “Teases others”, “ “Threatens to hurt others” • Internalizing ‘‘Worries’’, ‘‘Appears unhappy, sad’’ • Social Competence • Social skills: “congratulates others when good things happen to them”, • Leadership:“is good at getting people to work together”, • Adaptability: “recovers quickly after a setback.” (Crick & Grotpeter, 1996; Leadbeater & Sukhawathanakul, 2011; Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2004)

10. Assessing classroom levels • Classroom level scores were computed for each child as the average of his or her classmates’ • social competence and • social responsibility • i.e. without the influence of the child’s own score (following Kellam, Aber etc.)

11. Effects of Victimization on Internalizing

12. Effects of Victimization on Aggression

13. Conclusion: quality of interactions matter • Children’s social competence with a variety of peers mediate the link between peer victimization and increases in mental health problems • Children’s socially responsible roles within classrooms may reduce the effects of victimization on internalization and aggression (by setting protective norms?) • Assessing classroom norms may require class level observational methods or annual renewal of sample to increase class size.

14. Study 2: Assessing positive peer influences across the transition to young adulthood • Using an accelerated longitudinal design we computed the trajectories of • peer support and positive and negative activities with peers and anxiety symptoms We then asked • Whether initial levels and changes in peer support and peer activities predict changes in anxiety symptoms.

15. Data from the Victoria Healthy Youth Survey

16. Measures • Covariates Age, SES • Anxiety Symptoms • Brief Child and Family Phone Interview (Cunningham et al 2009) • Peer Emotional Support • e.g. ‘I rely on my friends for emotional support’ ‘My peers are good at helping me to solve problems

17. Quality of interactions with peers • Positive Peer Activities • Difference between number of positive activities (playing sport, working hard in school, performing, church or spiritual groups) and negative activities (smoking, drinking & using drugs, gangs, panhandling). Higher values indicate more positive activities. • Mean number of activities averaged across all waves is controlled to remove effects of more activity from the difference score.

18. Univariate trajectories of anxiety

19. Univariatetrajectories of peer support β= .03

20. Univariate trajectories of peer activities

21. Figure 4: Association between peer support, peer activities and anxiety symptoms over time Anxiety T1 Anxiety T2 Anxiety T3 Anxiety T4 Coefficients for females are shown in parentheses 1 1 1 3 2 1 1 0 Slope -.08 (-.52*) Intercept -.11*(-.07)* Slope Slope Intercept Intercept 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 3 1 3 Support T2 Support T3 Support T4 Support T1 Activities T3 Activities T1 Activities T2 Activities T4

22. Conclusions: Interactions matter • Social support is stable across the transition to young adulthood and adolescent levels predict levels of anxiety in females. • Opportunities for positive peer activities decline and negative activities increase over the transition to young adulthood. BUT • Higher levels of positive activities in adolescence predict declines in anxiety over time for boys and girls.

23. Can we measure positive peer influences over time? • Peer (and romantic) relationships change frequently and vary systematically with context changes. • Assessing the effects of peer influences may need to take into account the values, beliefs and opportunities offered by the contexts of these influences – neighborhoods, schools, classrooms, colleges, residences, workplaces, etc. and the opportunities that these settings afford for positive interactions with peers.

24. Thinking forward? • How can we tap positive peer interactions across developmental stages and changing contexts ? • How can we improve opportunities for the positive peer interactions at each developmental stage and across transitions ?