Same feathers, different flocks: Breaking down the meaning of ‘behavioral Homophily’ in the etiology of crime

Abstract

Purpose: This study’s purpose is to (1) examine how behavioral homophily relates to deviance among friendship pairs and (2) to assess how deviance and non-deviance homophily may be independently and jointly important for deviant behavior. Methods: Using a sample of 2154 individuals nested within 1077 dyadic friendship pairs, a series of mixed-effects models explore how behavioral, deviance, and non-deviance homophily at the dyadic level relate to an actor’s theft, vandalism, violence, drug, and alcohol use. Results: Findings demonstrate that behavioral homophily is a more robust protective factor than risk factor for deviance. Specifically, non-deviance homophily is significantly more related to abstaining from offending than deviance homophily is in promoting offending for theft, vandalism, violence, and drug use. And while behavioral homophily was not significantly associated with alcohol use, deviance homophily related to higher levels of alcohol use and non-deviance homophily related to less alcohol use with relatively equal effect sizes. Conclusions: Behavioral homophily contains two empirically and theoretically distinct components – deviance and non-deviance homophily. While both criminological theory and research have long established that peers “matter,” behavioral homophily across friendships can operate in a bifurcated role by associating with offending while simultaneously relating to normative behavior.

Developmental Trajectories of Justice System-Involved Friendship Proportion: Relevance for Predicting Continued Offending Risk in Emerging Adulthood

“…These results seem to indicate that the entirety of the composition of a close friendship collective matters in this regard and that relationships with normative friends may help to buffer against those with deviant friends within these close friendship collectives. These findings are consistent with past research on this topic (Boman IV & Mowen, 2018; Haynie, 2002). However, where this study expands on these prior findings is the establishment of the relevance of development.…”

Homophily in Voting Behavior: Evidence from Preferential Voting

“…These include, among others, our choice of friends (Adida et al 2015) and life partners (Skopek et al 2011). We generally tend to keep in touch with people whose age and gender (Stehlé et al 2013;Smith et al 2014), race (Smith et al 2014), religion (Adida et al 2015), education (Smith et al 2014), social class (McPherson et al 2001, behavior (Boman IV and Mowen 2018) or political ideology (Boutyline and Willer 2017;Huber and Malhotra 2017) is similar to ours.…”

Labeling effects of initial juvenile justice system processing decision on youth interpersonal ties*

“…Depending on the outcome of interest, we also included measures of the total number of deviant or nondeviant peers at baseline to account for initial differences in friendship network types. Initial levels of certain types of peers may be related to homophily or selection of similar peers or to the maintenance of peers related to deviant behavior (Boman & Mowen, 2018; Ragan, 2020). On average, youth reported 1.61 (SD = 1.57) deviant friends at baseline and 1.90 (SD = 1.62) nondeviant friends at baseline.…”