Social Networks in Early Adolescence: Introduction to the Special Issue

The Importance of Peer Relations in Early Adolescence

Early adolescence (10–14 years of age) is a developmental period when peer relations become increasingly important (Hartup, 1993). On the one hand, early adolescents spend considerable time among same-age others in school and during extracurricular activities. On the other hand, this period is characterized by significant psychosocial changes and a shift in social reliance from parents to peers, as early adolescents begin to seek social and emotional support from their peer groups (Vijayakumar & Pfeifer, 2020). They increasingly seek social acceptance and emotional support from same-age others, driven by developmental changes, including heightened self-awareness, an increased need for autonomy, and evolving socio-cognitive abilities (Brown & Larson, 2009; East et al., 1987; Oberle et al., 2010).

Peers provide a sense of belonging and serve as a critical context for learning social and emotional skills (Prati et al., 2021; Roeser et al., 2000; Rubin et al., 2015). Positive peer interactions are linked to higher self-esteem and well-being, while negative experiences, such as peer rejection or bullying, can contribute to emotional distress and maladaptive behaviors (Mitic et al., 2021; Oberle et al., 2010; Rubin et al., 2011). In line with these developments, early adolescence is a period when youth become especially susceptible to peer influence and increasingly adhere to peer group norms that are in constant development (Laursen & Veenstra, 2021; Steinberg & Monahan, 2007; Veenstra, 2025). The significance of peer influence has been found for a wide range of adaptive and maladaptive behaviors; including academic achievement and motivation, prosocial and antisocial behavior, delinquency, and substance use (Brechwald & Prinstein, 2011).

Social network analysis is a widely applied tool for studying peer relations, as it inherently focuses on interdependent relationships between individuals. Recent advances in statistical models allow for disentangling important mechanisms underlying the co-development of social networks and early adolescents’ behavior: peer influence and the drivers of relationship choices (Steglich et al., 2010; Steglich & Snijders, 2022; Veenstra et al., 2013).

The studies included in this special issue contribute to this literature. They investigate positive (Piera Pi-Sunyer et al., 2024; Qin et al., 2024; Renick & Schaefer, 2025; Vit et al., 2024) as well as negative peer relationships (Pistocchi et al., 2024) among early adolescents. Most of them focus on peer relations in schools (Holler & Schüßler, 2024; Pistocchi et al., 2024; Qin et al., 2024; Vit et al., 2024), one study examines close ties in an out-of-school summer program (Renick & Schaefer, 2025), while another takes into account friendship relations in general (Piera Pi-Sunyer et al., 2024). Half of the studies investigate the drivers of peer selection and how peers influence each other (Holler & Schüßler, 2024; Qin et al., 2024; Vit et al., 2024), the other half focuses on the association between peer relations and different psychological, social-emotional, and academic outcomes (Piera Pi-Sunyer et al., 2024; Pistocchi et al., 2024; Renick & Schaefer, 2025).

Positive and Negative Peer Relationships

Positive peer relations, such as friendships, are important for a wide range of positive and negative outcomes in adolescence. It has been long emphasized that the impact of peer relations is not just a dyadic effect, but the structure and the dynamics of peer relations matters for both individual and collective outcomes (Coleman, 1960, 1994). Having high-quality friendships and being liked by peers are positively associated with increased social capital (Coleman, 1987; Cook, 2014; Frank et al., 2013), cognitive and social developmental outcomes, while being rejected is a risk factor for internalizing and externalizing problems and maladaptive psychosocial functioning (Hartup, 1996).

Contributing to the literature on the effect of positive relationships, the study by Piera Pi-Sunyer et al. (2024) in this special issue investigates the association between perceived friendship quality and self-judgements among adolescent girls from London. Confirming the beneficial psychological effects of having supportive peer relationships, they find that higher perceived friendship quality is associated with higher positive self-judgement and lower negative self-judgements. This association holds similarly for early and mid-adolescents.

Renick and Schaefer’s (2025) study in this special issue examines how peer relations and social-emotional outcomes develop within an out-of-school program serving Latine adolescents in California. They find that during the program, the number of positive ties increases, and there is a cross-sectional association between close ties to peers and social-emotional outcomes such as mattering, connection, and program climate perception.

Peer relations, however, are not always positive; an increasing number of studies focus on various types of negative relations, such as antipathies and bullying (Harrigan et al., 2020; Veenstra & Huitsing, 2021). The high prevalence of bullying among young people is a serious challenge faced by most societies (Biswas et al., 2020). Bullying is a recurring ill-intentioned act that occurs between one or more bullies and their victim, characterized by a real or perceived power imbalance (Olweus, 1993). Bullying is not an isolated behaviour; it is embedded in group processes and status hierarchies of adolescents (Huitsing & Veenstra, 2012; Salmivalli et al., 1996). Therefore, social network analysis is a particularly fruitful approach for studying bullying behavior of early adolescents (Veenstra & Huitsing, 2021).

The study by Pistocchi et al. (2024) in this special issue contributes to a line of literature that focuses on intergroup bullying relationships (Fandrem et al., 2009; Kisfalusi et al., 2020; Kuldas et al., 2022; Tolsma et al., 2013). More specifically, it examines intra- and interreligious bullying among Muslim and non-Muslim German adolescents. Religiosity has been found to be an important determinant of adolescents’ peer relationships (Leszczensky & Pink, 2017). Pistocchi et al. (2024) show that bullying also often crosses religious group boundaries, and intra- and interreligious bullying might have different consequences for the victims. In line with previous studies (Juvonen et al., 2011), Pistocchi et al. (2024) find that bullying can be detrimental to students’ academic achievement, but show that it is mainly Muslim students who are vulnerable to the negative academic consequences of bullying, especially when bullied by non-Muslim peers.

The Declining Role of Parental Directing in Adolescents’ Friendship Choices

The declining reliance on parents during early adolescence is evidenced by the study of Qin et al. (2024) in this special issue. They find that while peer characteristics such as academic achievement, prosociality, and aggression are important determinants of adolescent friendships, friends also influence each other with regard to these behaviours. Despite the encouragement of parents to select high-achieving, prosocial, and less aggressive friends, parental direction had no impact on friendship selection.

Academic Achievement and Ambitions

Educational outcomes are influenced by the peer group individuals are part of. Being integrated into the social networks of positive and supportive peer relationships in an educational context and belonging to peer groups with pro-achievement norms have been found to have a positive effect on educational success (Coleman, 1988; Ivaniushina & Alexandrov, 2017; Stadtfeld et al., 2018).

Students are likely to have friends who have similar characteristics, attitudes, and behavior (Kandel, 1978; McPherson et al., 2001). Friendship homophily has been found with regard to a lot of school-related attitudes and behavior, such as academic achievement (Flashman, 2012; Kretschmer et al., 2018; Rambaran et al., 2017), problematic school behavior (Geven et al., 2013; Rambaran et al., 2017; Shin & Ryan, 2014a), achievement goals and academic motivation (Frank et al., 2008; Shin & Ryan, 2014a, 2014b), preferences for educational subjects (Raabe et al., 2019), and educational aspirations (Raabe & Wölfer, 2018). The similarity between the friends can be the result of at least two separate mechanisms: selection and peer influence. Whereas students are likely to select friends with similar educational attitudes and academic achievement, friends also influence each other’s academic achievement. Evidence has been found for both processes among adolescents (Altermatt & Pomerantz, 2005; Flashman, 2012; Fortuin et al., 2016; Gremmen et al., 2017; Laninga-Wijnen et al., 2019; Rambaran et al., 2017; Stark et al., 2017).

Vit et al.’s (2024) study in this special issue contributes to this line of literature by analyzing peer influence on academic achievement and ambitions. In contrast to previous studies that focused on educational expectations in a more distant future among middle adolescents (Kretschmer & Roth, 2021; Lorenz et al., 2020), this study investigates school subject-related academic ambitions (in mathematics and Hungarian literature) among early adolescents in Hungarian elementary schools. They find that early adolescents tend to adjust both their academic ambitions and their achievement to that of their friends. The exact mechanisms, however, differ in the case of the two subjects: for ambitions and achievement in Hungarian literature, high-performing students are especially influential, while for mathematics, lower-performing students seem to have more influence on their friends. Qin et al. (2024), using achievement scores calculated from multiple subjects, find a similar tendency as Vit et al. (2024) found for mathematics: among the studied Chinese adolescents, peer influence was stronger among low-achieving students.

Studies in this special issue also confirm that academic achievement is an important characteristic on which early adolescents base their friendship choices. Qin et al. (2024) find that adolescents tend to select friends with similar school performance but are also attracted to high-achieving peers. Vit et al.’s (2024) finding aligns with this result but shows that this association might be subject-specific; they find a similar pattern in the case of achievement in Hungarian literature but no effect in the case of mathematics.

Physical Ability

Academic achievement is only one of the many factors that play a role in early adolescents’ status hierarchies. While sports performance and physical ability have been found to be an important predictor of status among adolescents (Bocskor, 2022; Chase & Dummer, 1992; Coleman, 1961; Dunn et al., 2007; Hollett et al., 2020), it has received much less attention among social network scholars than academic achievement. A recent study by Prochnow et al. (2020) reviews studies that investigate the impact of peer networks on children and adolescents’ physical activity. The article by Holler and Schüßler (2024) in this special issue takes a different approach: analyzing high school data from Germany, they investigate how physical ability is associated with collaboration networks in physical education. They find that controlling for liking relations and gender, adolescents tend to select high and similarly performing peers as team partners. Their article also connects to a line of literature that underscores the important role of peer-perceived characteristics in shaping social relations (Boda et al., 2020; Grow et al., 2016; Kisfalusi et al., 2018, 2020); they find that only peer-perceived physical ability is associated with team partner nominations, physical self-concept and teacher rating of physical ability are not.

Methodological Advances in Social Network Analysis

In the last decades, statistical methods have been developed for the analysis of social networks. Standard statistical methods (e.g., ordinary least squares and logistic regression) assume independence among actors and ties; therefore, they cannot model network dependencies. In social networks, however, several underlying social mechanisms (e.g., reciprocity, transitivity, homophily) structure the formation of ties between actors. Statistical methods in social network analysis explicitly model the dependence among ties and, therefore, are able to disentangle various mechanisms of tie formation. The two most widely applied cross-sectional and longitudinal methods are exponential random graph models (ERGMs, Lusher et al., 2013; Robins et al., 2007) and stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOMs, Snijders et al., 2010; Steglich et al., 2010). SAOMs are especially suitable to separate selection and influence processes in social networks, that is, to disentangle whether peers with similar characteristics are more likely to form ties with each other over time (selection), or whether peers become more similar over time to peers they are connected to (peer influence) (Steglich et al., 2010; Steglich & Snijders, 2022). Two of the papers published in this special issue apply longitudinal SAOMs to analyze the co-evolution of friendships and different student characteristics such as academic achievement, ambitions, aggression, and prosocial behavior (Qin et al., 2024; Vit et al., 2024), while one paper uses ERGMs to investigate the association between physical ability and social relationships in physical education (Holler & Schüßler, 2024).

Conclusion

Articles in this special issue highlight that peer relations, peer influence, and peer selection are crucial for grasping how early adolescents navigate their social worlds within and beyond school settings. It is important to emphasize that peer effects should not be simplified to group fixed effects. At the same time, peer effects go well beyond the dyad and therefore should not be handled merely as interpersonal influences either. The structure and the dynamics of peer relations, and the inherent interpendencies make the consideration of them in terms of social networks essential.

Social networks shape critical developmental outcomes, including academic achievement, emotional well-being, identity formation, and risk-taking behaviors (Brown & Larson, 2009; Piera Pi-Sunyer et al., 2024; Pistocchi et al., 2024; Qin et al., 2024; Renick & Schaefer, 2025; Vit et al., 2024). Structural mechanisms inherent in early adolescents’ social networks regulate their social integration, exclusion, and collective behavioral patterns. In this process, group norms, informal status hierarchies, and multiplex social ties develop (Holler & Schüßler, 2024; Qin et al., 2024; Rubin et al., 2015; Vit et al., 2024). By examining peer influence within social structures, researchers can better understand how early adolescents adopt behaviors, attitudes, and social roles in ways that extend beyond simple one-on-one interactions. Additionally, out-of-school contexts, such as extracurricular activities and digital social spaces, complicate these dynamics, highlighting the need for multiplex network-based approaches to early adolescent socialization (Hooijsma et al., 2020; Renick & Schaefer, 2025; Veenstra et al., 2023).

Future research on social networks in early adolescence faces significant methodological and ethical challenges. The rise of social media has introduced new layers of complexity, as early adolescents’ interactions are increasingly hybrid, blending online and offline exchanges in ways that reshape influence and selection processes (Nesi et al., 2018). Decreasing willingness to survey participation, ethical concerns, and limited researcher access to social media information create obstacles for studying social network mechanisms (Livingstone & Third, 2017; Molina & Borgatti, 2021). Moreover, multiplexity complicates traditional network analysis, requiring more sophisticated methods to capture the simultaneous effects of friendship, competition, collaboration, and digital engagement (Hooijsma et al., 2020; Vörös & Snijders, 2017). Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary approaches that integrate computational social science, developmental psychology, and ethical research frameworks to ensure that studies on early adolescent social networks remain both methodologically rigorous, socially responsible, and informative for educational policy.