Our Buddies, Ourselves: The Role of Sexual Homophily in Adolescent Friendship Networks

Abstract

The present study tests the assumption that peers wield sufficient influence to induce sexual homophily (i.e., similarities in sexual experiences). Because girls face greater stigma for their sexual experiences than do boys, sexual homophily may be greater in girls' friendship networks than in boys'. Stochastic actor-based models were used to analyze network data (n = 2,566; ages 14-18) from two high schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Sexual homophily was present in friendship networks. Girls and boys were equally susceptible to their friends' influence, but the former exhibited a stronger preference for befriending same sexual debut status peers than the latter. The findings suggest that adolescents-particularly girls-"curate" their networks to minimize peer ostracism.

Figure 1

The differential effects of sexual debut on friendship formation by gender. Note. This plot reports the estimates of the gender and sexual intercourse interaction terms predicting friendship formation, displaying 95% confidence intervals calculated from Model 2 in Table 2. The panels were organized by the different types of effects: similarity (higher values indicating greater similarity in friends than not), alter (positive values indicating more rapid increase of received nominations), and ego effects (positive values indicating more rapid increase of nominations).