Peer Relationships In Adolescents

Adolescent students are also believed to be heavily influenced by those around them, particularly their chosen peers. In fact, according to
Laird & Pettit (1999), peer relationships in adolescence are believed to play an integral part in desirable and undesirable developmental outcomes. Moreover, Adolescent students’ daily activities revolve around peers who have influence over a person’s life. In fact, according to Aries (2001), deviant peer groups have negative influence to those around them. They are also viewed by people negatively as, their actions do not follow the rules and values that parents teach their children.
According to a study done by Haugaard (2001), adolescents consider the social rewards of having done acts deviant behaviors,

These effects are often harmful in nature. In fact, Crockett (2000), concluded in his research that the group with the deviant friends was more likely participate in delinquent acts than the group with conventional friends or the friendless group. Furthermore, the group with the deviant friends experienced higher levels of depression than the non-deviant and friendless group. It was inferred that having friends of any type serve as a buffer against feelings of loneliness. However, he also states that any type of peer association, whether good or bad, may protect adolescents from the social isolation that often precedes depression.
According to Müller, Hofmann, Fleischli and Studer (2016), their study determined that the development of antisocial behaviour among students is influenced by the behavioural characteristics of their classmates. Their study was conducted with 825 students. These students answered questionnaires about self- and peer-reports on aggressive, delinquent, and disruptive classroom behaviour. He concluded that the perceived characteristics of the entire classroom, dominant students, and friends significantly predicted self-reported aggressive and disruptive behavioural development. However, it did not significant predicted delinquency in

In fact, a study done by Jenkins (1996), investigated of students’ academic performance level and extracurricular activities as predictors of drug usage and its relationship to peer influence. The sample consisted of 2, 229 eighth (42%), tenth (35%), and twelfth (23%) grade students from seventeen districts in the northeast. The districts represented were highly diverse with participants having different ethnicity background such as white, black, Hispanic, and Asian. It also included 54 environments, inclusive of urban, suburban, and rural communities. The researcher concluded that academic performance and enjoyable extracurricular participation explained a small portion of the variance in the use of gateway drugs for all three grades. Therefore, students that had higher academic performance who participated in extracurricular activities were less likely to use alcohol and drugs. However, friends that used gateway drugs increased the amount of variance explained, and peers that used drugs was noted as the strongest predictor of drug use. As a result, peer influence presented as the strongest variable regarding an influence to use alcohol and