Barbara J. Costello - Peer Pressure, Peer Prevention: The Role of Friends in Crime and Conformity

First published 2016
by Routledge
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The right of Barbara J. Costello and Trina L. Hope to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Costello, Barbara J. | Hope, Trina L.
Title: Peer pressure, peer prevention : the role of friends in crime and conformity / Barbara J.

Costello & Trina L. Hope.

Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037697| ISBN 9781138951709 (hbk. : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9781138951693 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315668055 (ebk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Conformity. | Peer pressure. | Influence (Psychology) | Criminology.
Classification: LCC HM1246 .C67 2016 | DDC 303.3/2dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037697

ISBN: 978-1-138-95170-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-95169-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-66805-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In memory of my mother, Nancy J. MacFarlane, and for Brad.

BJC

For Warren, Benjamin, and Lillian.

TLH

The idea for this book came out of my reading of the literature on peer influence processes. Given my background as a student of Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson at the University of Arizona, I began my career skeptical of explanations of peer influence that relied on peers teaching each other that deviant behavior is okay or good. My background as a teenager who engaged in some minor delinquent acts also left me skeptical of explanations that held that youths commit crime because they dont see anything wrong with itmy friends and I were well aware that the mischief we were up to was not right, not acceptable under the circumstances, and that wed be in a lot of trouble if we got caught. There was nothing in the literature on peer influence that convinced me that my skepticism was misguided. Further, it struck me that criminologists studying peer influence tended to overlook one obvious factyouths engage in conforming behavior together at least as much as they engage in deviance together. In fact, I noted this point in my first professional publication (Costello 1997).

I became more interested in studying peer influence as social network analysis came to be used extensively in criminology. I attended an excellent course in social network analysis taught by Stanley Wasserman and Bernice Pescosolido at Indiana University. I learned a lot about network analysis in the course, including the fact that it simply couldnt answer the questions that I thought were key in the study of peer influence. Network analysis can reveal a great deal about the structure of social groups and how attitudes and behaviors are connected among group members, but what it cant do is tell us much about how peer influence plays out on the micro-level. If a behavior spreads across members of a group over time, how and why does that happen? This is the question of causal mechanism that I think has remained unanswered despite advances in quantitative methods in sociology and criminology.

I started asking my students at the University of Rhode Island (URI) questions about their experiences with peer influence, and collected some preliminary data from them in the form of papers written for my classes. I realized that student papers were a great source of data that required few resources to collect, and in Fall 2009 I formally collected data in the form of anonymous papers written by my students in a large General Sociology course I was teaching. I realized that quantitative data would be a great addition to the qualitative data I had, and I asked my friend and graduate school colleague Trina Hope if she would be interested and able to collect some data at the University of Oklahoma (OU) for a collaborative project. With an eye primarily toward positive peer influence, we designed and administered a questionnaire to a small sample of URI students and a larger sample of OU students, and also collected additional qualitative data from both samples. Although our sample cannot be assumed to be representative of students at these universities, we ended up with a rich data set including both qualitative and quantitative measures of peer influence processes.