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Crafting Mosaics: Person‐Centered Religious Influence and Selection in Adolescent Friendships
Author(s) -
adams jimi,
Schaefer David R.,
Ettekal Andrea Vest
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal for the scientific study of religion
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.941
H-Index - 71
eISSN - 1468-5906
pISSN - 0021-8294
DOI - 10.1111/jssr.12638
Subject(s) - latent class model , selection (genetic algorithm) , dynamics (music) , intersection (aeronautics) , sociology , social psychology , class (philosophy) , longitudinal data , latent variable , psychology , computer science , geography , artificial intelligence , pedagogy , demography , cartography , machine learning
This research addresses the intersection of two key domains of adolescents’ lives: religion and peer networks. Religion scholars argue that religion is multi‐faceted and better understood by focusing on combinations of indicators (i.e., mosaics), versus a variable‐centered approach. We adopt this framework and investigate the interplay between religion and peer networks, both in how religious mosaics are shaped by friends and how religious profiles affect friend selection dynamics. With data from two schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate religious mosaics using latent class analysis (LCA) to identify profiles consisting of combinations of commonly available survey‐based measures of religious attitudes, behaviors, and identities. Finding evidence of theoretically expected profiles, we then use stochastic actor–based models (SABMs) to investigate network dynamics for these LCA‐based religious profiles. We demonstrate how the profile data can be integrated within the SABM framework to evaluate processes of friend selection and influence. Results show evidence of adolescents influencing one another's religious mosaics, but not selecting friends on that basis.