Robert Faris

Mapping American Adolescent Religious Participation

Sociologists know surprisingly little about the religious lives of adolescents in the United States. This article begins to redress that unfortunate lack of knowledge by examining descriptive findings on adolescent religious participation from three recent, reputable national surveys of American youth. We present descriptive statistics on three fundamental aspects of youth religious participation: religious affiliation, religious service attendance, and involvement in church youth groups. We also examine the influences of gender, race, age, and region on these religious outcomes. This descriptive inquiry should help to heighten broader understanding of and to lay down a baseline of essential information about American adolescent religious participation. Further research is needed to investigate the social influence of different kinds of religiosity on various outcomes in the lives of American youth. We know relatively little about the religious lives of American adolescents. The vast majority of research in the sociology of religion in the United States focuses on American adults, ages 18 and older. And few scholars of American adolescents in other fields pay close attention to youth’s religious lives. As a result, our social scientific knowledge of the religious affiliations, practices, beliefs, experiences, and attitudes of American youth is impoverished. 1 This is a problem for many reasons. American adolescents between the ages of 10‐19 represent about 14 percent of all Americans (adolescents ages 10‐24 represent 21 percent), an ageminority population deserving scholarly attention as much as any other group. Indeed, American adolescents may deserve extra scholarly attention by sociologists of religion. Adolescence represents a crucial developmental transition from childhood to adulthood and so can disclose a tremendous amount of knowledge about religious socialization and change in the life course. Adolescents are a population that many religious organizations, both congregations and parachurch ministries, particularly target in order to exert influence in their lives. Adolescence and young adulthood is also the life stage when religious conversion is most likely to take place. Adolescence furthermore provides a unique opportunity to study religious influences on family relationships and dynamics, peer interactions, risk behaviors, and many other outcome variables. Finally, adolescence provides an ideal baseline stage for longitudinal research on religious influences in people’s lives.

Status Struggles Network Centrality and Gender Segregation in Same- and Cross-Gender Aggression

Literature on aggression often suggests that individual deficiencies, such as social incompetence, psychological difficulties, or troublesome home environments, are responsible for aggressive behavior. In this article, by contrast, we examine aggression from a social network perspective, arguing that social network centrality, our primary measure of peer status, increases the capacity for aggression and that competition to gain or maintain status motivates its use. We test these arguments using a unique longitudinal dataset that enables separate consideration of same- and cross-gender aggression. We find that aggression is generally not a maladjusted reaction typical of the socially marginal; instead, aggression is intrinsic to status and escalates with increases in peer status until the pinnacle of the social hierarchy is attained. Over time, individuals at the very bottom and those at the very top of a hierarchy become the least aggressive youth. We also find that aggression is influenced not so much by individual gender differences as by relationships with the other gender and patterns of gender segregation at school. When cross-gender interactions are plentiful, aggression is diminished. Yet these factors are also jointly implicated in peer status: in schools where cross-gender interactions are rare, cross-gender friendships create status distinctions that magnify the consequences of network centrality.

The Social Ecology of Adolescent Alcohol Misuse.

A conceptual framework based on social ecology, social learning, and social control theories guided identification of social contexts, contextual attributes, and joint effects that contribute to development of adolescent alcohol misuse. Modeling of alcohol use, suggested by social learning theory, and indicators of the social bond, suggested by social control theory, were examined in the family, peer, school, and neighborhood contexts. Interactions between alcohol modeling and social bond indicators were tested within and between contexts. Data were from a longitudinal study of 6,544 students, 1,663 of their parents, and the U.S. Census. All contexts were uniquely implicated in development of alcohol misuse from ages 11 through 17 years, and most alcohol modeling effects were contingent on attributes of social bonds.

Payday Lending: A Business Model that Encourages Chronic Borrowing:

The tremendous growth in the demand for very small, short-term loans by credit constrained households is being largely filled by companies offering payday loans. This article explores the explosive growth of payday lending as a source of short-term consumer credit in low- and moderate-income communities, with a special emphasis on the relationship between industry business practices and the high incidence of perpetual indebtedness in which an increasing number of payday borrowers find themselves. Empirical analysis confirms two related truths about payday lending. First, there is no denying the large and growing demand for this consumer credit and the rapidly expanding network of companies willing to supply it. Second, despite its expanding customer base and notwithstanding industry denials, the financial performance of the payday loan industry, at least in North Carolina, is significantly enhanced by the successful conversion of more and more occasional users into chronic borrowers.

Peer Smoking, Other Peer Attributes, and Adolescent Cigarette Smoking: A Social Network Analysis

Peer attributes other than smoking have received little attention in the research on adolescent smoking, even though the developmental literature suggests the importance of multiple dimensions of adolescent friendships and peer relations. Social network analysis was used to measure the structure of peer relations (i.e., indicators of having friends, friendship quality, and status among peers) and peer smoking (i.e., friend and school smoking). We used three-level hierarchical growth models to examine the contribution of each time-varying peer variable to individual trajectories of smoking from age 11 to 17 while controlling for the other variables, and we tested interactions between the peer structure and peer smoking variables. Data were collected over five waves of assessment from a longitudinal sample of 6,579 students in three school districts. Findings suggest a greater complexity in the peer context of smoking than previously recognized.

Casualties of Social Combat School Networks of Peer Victimization and Their Consequences

We point to group processes of status conflict and norm enforcement as fundamental elements in the development of school-based victimization. Socially vulnerable youth are frequently harassed for violating norms, but the logic of status competition implies they are not the only victims: to the extent that aggression is instrumental for social climbing, increases in status should increase risk—at least until the pinnacle of the hierarchy is reached. Victimization causes serious harm, and, we argue, at the margin these consequences will be magnified by status. We test these ideas using longitudinal network data on friendship and victimization from 19 schools. For most students, status increases the risk of victimization. However, youth at the uppermost extremes of the school hierarchy—students in the top 5 percent of centrality and those with cross-gender friendships where such friendships are rare—sit just above the fray, unlikely to fall victim to their peers. As expected, females and physically or socially vulnerable youth are victimized at particularly high rates. Victims experience psychological distress and social marginalization, and these adverse effects are magnified by status. For most students, gains in status increase the likelihood of victimization and the severity of its consequences.

A social contextual analysis of youth cigarette smoking development

INTRODUCTION We apply a social contextual perspective based on Bronfenbrenners ecology of human development theory to understanding development of youth cigarette smoking. We examine the contributions of family, peer, school, and neighborhood contexts. Context attributes examined were derived from social learning and social control theories. METHODS Data are from 6,544 youth who participated in at least one of five waves of data collection between Spring 2002 and Spring 2004, 1,663 randomly selected parents who participated in one or more of three waves of data collection in the same time period; and the U.S. Census. Three-level hierarchical growth models were used to examine the contributions of time-varying measures of the four social contexts to development of smoking from age 11-17 years. Interactions between variables were examined within and between social contexts. RESULTS Attributes of each social context made independent contributions to adolescent smoking development; there also were significant interactions between variables from different contexts indicating joint contextual effects. Attributes of the social bond moderated exposure to models of smoking within and between the family and peer contexts. DISCUSSION Results suggest the value of a social contextual perspective in research on the etiology of youth smoking development as well as the utility of guidance by social learning and social control theories. While all contexts were implicated in adolescent smoking, the family and peer contexts were primarily implicated, with findings suggesting the need for consideration of interactive effects between social learning and social control variables within and between these contexts.

Bullying as a Longitudinal Predictor of Adolescent Dating Violence

PURPOSE One suggested approach to preventing adolescent dating violence is to prevent behavioral precursors to dating violence, such as bullying. However, no longitudinal study has examined bullying as a behavioral precursor to dating violence. In this study, longitudinal data were used to examine (1) whether direct and indirect bullying perpetration in the sixth grade predicted the onset of physical dating violence perpetration by the eighth grade and (2) whether the associations varied by sex and race/ethnicity of the adolescent. METHODS Data were collected in school from sixth graders in three primarily rural counties and then again when students were in the eighth grade. Analyses were conducted with 1,154 adolescents who had not perpetrated dating violence at the sixth-grade assessment. The sample was 47% male, 29% black, and 10% of another race/ethnicity than black or white. RESULTS Direct bullying, defined as hitting, slapping, or picking on another kid in the sixth grade, predicted the onset of physical dating violence perpetration by the eighth grade, controlling for indirect bullying and potential confounders. Although indirect bullying, defined as spreading false rumors and excluding students from friendship groups, was associated with the onset of physical dating violence perpetration in bivariate analyses, it did not predict the onset of physical dating violence when controlling for direct bullying. None of the associations examined varied by sex or race/ethnicity of the adolescents. CONCLUSIONS Our findings suggest that efforts targeted at preventing direct bullying may also prevent the onset of physical dating violence.

Visualization techniques for categorical analysis of social networks with multiple edge sets

Abstract The growing popularity and diversity of social network applications present new opportunities as well as new challenges. The resulting social networks have high value to business intelligence, sociological studies, organizational studies, epidemical studies, etc. The ability to explore and extract information of interest from the networks is thus crucial. However, these networks are often large and composed of multi-categorical nodes and edges, making it difficult to visualize and reason with conventional methods. In this paper, we show how to combine statistical methods with visualization to address these challenges, and how to arrange layouts differently to better bring out different aspects of the networks. We applied our methods to several social networks to demonstrate their effectiveness in characterizing the networks and clarifying the structures of interest, leading to new findings.

Toxic Ties Networks of Friendship, Dating, and Cyber Victimization

We examine instances of youth cyber aggression, arguing that the close relationships of friendship and romance substantially influence the chances of being targeted. We investigate networks of friendship, dating, and aggression among a sample of 788 eighth- to twelfth-grade students in a longitudinal study of a New York school. Approximately 17 percent reported some involvement in cyber aggression within the past week. LGBTQ youth were targeted at a rate over four times that of their heterosexual peers, and females were more frequent victims than males. Rates of cyber aggression were 4.3 times higher between friends than between friends of friends. According to both an exponential random graph model and a lagged, network MRQAP regression, electronic attacks emerged far more frequently between current or former friends and dating partners, presumably due to competition, revenge, or attempts to fend off romantic rivals.