Mapping Social Relationships at School

Mapping Social Relationships at School

The Q-Connectivity Project

Peers and peer networks are important proximal social influences across the lifespan starting at an early age, and, from a developmental perspective, few other microsystemic contexts are as important to children's healthy development. Indeed, the extent to which children form relationships with peers, and the nature and quality of those relationships, significantly influences a wide range of health-related behaviors and developmental outcomes, including delinquency and substance use. However, extant conceptual models and methodological approaches lack the sophistication needed to allow scientists to adequately develop hypotheses about how and the degree to which peers socialize healthy and unhealthy outcomes. Thus, we propose to explore new methods of mapping young children's peer connectivity onto social profiles that are in the literature and that reflect risk for drug use and delinquency in adolescence. In doing so, we integrate concepts, methods, and innovations arising from three traditionally disparate disciplines - child development, theoretical mathematics, and statistics -to study the structure and organization of young children's peer relationships and peer socialization processes with regard to early behavioral risk factors.

Specifically, we are further developing and refining a new approach for studying social networks, called the Q-connectivity method. This method is derived from discrete homotopy theory (also called A-theory), which is a mathematical method of modeling complex systems and their dynamics. Our specific aims are to:

1. study the properties of individual children's peer networks, and
2. study the consistency and stability of these networks over time.

The concepts and methods that are generated from these aims will be applied to the following substantive question: How do individual differences among children and their peers as well as differences in interaction qualities contribute to variations in patterns of peer influence along behavioral risk dimensions?

We will focus specifically on early risk behaviors that are significant risk factors for later delinquency and substance use.

Funding Source

• National Institute of Drug Abuse, Challenged Child Project

Partnerships

• ASU’s School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
• Harvard University
• Duke University