Measuring peer influence susceptibility to alcohol use: Convergent and predictive validity of a new analogue assessment

Abstract

Research on peer socialization rarely examines individual differences in adolescents’ susceptibility to peer influence, perhaps because few theories or methods have elucidated how susceptibility is operationalized. This study offers a new analogue measure of peer influence susceptibility in adolescence that is adapted from sociological theory. A preliminary examination of this new paradigm included the study of individual differences in susceptibility to peer influence, convergent validity correlates, and predictive validity by examining decision-making on the task as a moderator of the prospective association between friends’ and adolescents’ engagement in one form of real-world risk-taking. Participants included 714 adolescents (54% female; 46.1% White, 20.9% Black, 24.2% Hispanic/Latinx, 6.2% mixed race or other) aged 15–18 years ( M = 16.1). Participants completed the Peer Analogue Susceptibility Task, peer nominations, and self-report measures at Time 1 and repeated an assessment of their own alcohol use 1 year later. Participants’ friends also reported their own alcohol use. Results indicated concurrent associations with peer influence susceptibility, rejection sensitivity, perceived importance of peer status, peer-nominated popularity, and self-reported resistance to peer influence. Furthermore, among adolescents demonstrating average and high levels of peer influence susceptibility on the task, greater perceived alcohol use among friends was associated with their own alcohol use 1 year later. Findings offer preliminary evidence for the convergent and predictive validity of a new approach to study peer influence susceptibility.

Introduction to the special section on susceptibility to peer influence

“…Duell and colleagues (2022) present findings that validate a new task designed to measure susceptibility to peer influence. The task relies on a hypothetical scenario that operationalizes susceptibility as changes in willingness to drink alcohol as a function of the number of friends who report that they would do the same.…”

What does it mean to be susceptible to influence? A brief primer on peer conformity and developmental changes that affect it

“…These indices of susceptibility also find that higher levels of trait susceptibility are linked to higher levels of conformity to friend behaviors (Prinstein et al, 2011). The present special section includes a new experimental index of conformity (Duell et al, 2020) that yields similar findings: Adolescents with high levels of assessed conformity were most likely to change their alcohol use over time to resemble that of friends. Finally, some studies posit a trait-like characteristic of opportunity openness, roughly defined as a willingness to engage in a behavior (e.g., consume alcohol), should someone (typically, but not necessarily, a peer) provide the possibility to do so (Gibbons et al, 2004).…”

Are (pre)adolescents differentially susceptible to experimentally manipulated peer acceptance and rejection? A vignette-based experiment

“…The first line of indirect evidence comes from correlational studies that have examined individual differences in susceptibility to various peer effects, which can be further distinguished based on the type of susceptibility examined. The first type is susceptibility to peer influence, which refers to the extent to which youths’ behaviors become more similar to those of their peers in outcomes such as delinquent behavior (Slagt et al, 2015), substance abuse (Duell et al, 2022), and sexual risk behaviors (Choukas-Bradley et al, 2014). The second type is susceptibility to peer behavior, which involves youths’ emotional reactions or psychological (mal)adjustment to the behaviors of peers toward them such as peer victimization (DiLalla et al, 2015; Kretschmer et al, 2013; Rudolph et al, 2021), friendship conflict and closeness (Tung et al, 2019), and supportive and negative relationships with their best friend (Fischer et al, 2022).…”