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Prosocial Peers as Risk, Protective, and Promotive Factors for the Prevention of Delinquency and Drug Use

  • Empirical Research
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Abstract

Risk, protective, and promotive factors are instrumental in predicting and, in some cases, explaining human behavior. In the current study, an attempt was made to determine which of these three functions prosocial peers served with respect their effect on future delinquency and drug use. A sample of 2905 youth (51% female, 47% White, 21% Hispanic, 17% Black, mean age = 12.14 years) from the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) project were included in this study. Longitudinal analyses, conducted over a period of one year and controlling for age, sex, race, parental knowledge, parental support, unsupervised routine activities, peer delinquency, and prior delinquency/drug use, revealed that associating with prosocial peers led to significant reductions in property offending and drug use. Although there was no evidence that prosocial peers moderated or neutralized the risk generated by delinquent peer associations, they did serve as risk and promotive factors. Hence, associating less often with prosocial peers predicted a rise in property offending and drug use (risk effect), whereas associating more often with prosocial peers predicted a decline in future property offending and drug use (promotive effect).

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Notes

  1. A collider effect or endogenous selection bias (Elwert and Winship, 2014) can occur when a researcher controls for a precursor or prior measure of the outcome variable. Conditioning on the outcome, as it is often called, can create a non-causal path between the predictor and outcome that appears causal on the surface, but which is actually the product of an interaction between the precursor and predictor variables. By assessing the precursor measure (Wave 1 delinquency or drug use) before the predictor variable (Wave 2 prosocial peers), the odds of producing a collider effect were greatly reduced (Greenland 2003).

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Acknowledgements

The author received no funding for this study.

Data Sharing Declaration

The datasets analyzed in the current study are available in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) depository: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/.

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  1. Department of Criminal Justice, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA, 19530-0730, USA

    Glenn D. Walters

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This research was approved by the Kutztown University Institutional Review Board (IRB).

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This was a secondary data analysis, although informed consent from parents and informed assent from youth were obtained when the study was originally conducted.

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Walters, G.D. Prosocial Peers as Risk, Protective, and Promotive Factors for the Prevention of Delinquency and Drug Use. J Youth Adolescence 49, 618–630 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01058-3

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