Archived: The Educational System in the United States: Case Study Findings

Other Influences on Adolescents
Peers
One of the defining characteristics of adolescence in the United States is the
importance of peers. Individuals come to define their own identity with the
broader peer group. Experimentation with identity may occur and the influence
of peers rises, generally peaking at about ninth grade. We were interested in how
the adolescents we studied were affected by their peers, and in particular, how
their perceptions of schooling were influenced by peers.
Friendships. 
Adolescent friendships were most often described by those we inter-
viewed as originating at school, though some talked about friends from their
neighborhood, sports teams, or churches. Friendships in adolescence are fluid and
age-stratified. In early adolescence most students identified friends in the same
grade or, at times, a year apart. Classes are generally age-segregated, and lunch-
time, often the only informal social time in the school day, is typically scheduled
by grade. One seventh-grader noted:
I don’t consider myself really good friends with any eighth-graders, but I talk
to them sometimes, maybe during (activities) or something. I mean, I’m not
enemies with them.
This begins to change in high school as classes are more often composed accord-
ing to ability rather than age, and as school activities and sports create opportuni-
ties for friendships across grades. For minority racial and ethnic groups, friend-
ships may be less stratified by school and age and be forged within neighbor-
hoods. Within schools it is also common to see friendships forming along racial
and ethnic lines, though there are certainly many exceptions. High school

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lunchrooms we observed were visibly segregated by race, and both administrators
and students indicated this was a source of concern.
Adolescent peer groups. 
Adolescents often affiliate with those with similar values,
and these groups may be readily identifiable to others by such features as their
dress, hair, speech, and musical choices. Among those we interviewed, identifi-
able peer groups do exist, but appear fluid, malleable, and overlapping. Students
do not seem preoccupied with these group identities, with the exception of those
who are in gangs (the most extreme versions of adolescent groups), but they
could easily recite some of the various groupings within their schools.
At the middle school level, students described a few definable groups, including
those based on race, athletic interests, musical tastes, and general behavior and
values. One student noted that, ‘‘I think that mostly the groups are based on how
someone acts, but probably people would say it is based on the type of music
they would listen to.’’
At a nearly all-white middle school in a wealthy suburb, the eighth-grade student
council president offered her view of group distinctions:
There are people who are really into school and grades who hang out to-
gether. There are two other groups. They do not hang out together, but they
do the same things. The popular group and the average group. There is defi-
nitely one group that is higher than all the rest in status. (We) are not more
pretty, but just cooler . . . . We are not mean to anybody else, although we
do put the others down sometimes in fun.
Among the large comprehensive high schools we visited, adolescent groups seem
a way to find a personal niche and a sense of community. A 10th-grader noted
that:
Our school is very, very large, it is public, and it draws different people from
very different social classes. We have people who live in $500,000 houses and
people who are below the poverty line, all at this school. I think all that to-
gether creates a very interesting and dynamic group. You have cliques. You
see walking down the hall totally different styles of clothing and behavior.
In these environments, students talked about groups that were further divided
into subgroups, and about ‘‘fuzzy boundaries’’ between groups. One high school
student at Springdale said that groups were defined by
Activities, lifestyle kind of. There’s like alternative, people with long hair or
who shave their heads, and then there are preppy people, usually athletes, not
necessarily real smart, but like pretty strong academically, and then there are

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real smart people. They kind of all get along pretty well. Your better friends
are usually people that are like you, which seems logical, but you also have
friends with all types of people.
Drug use and musical interests may further divide students. Another high school
student said:
You can look at most of the people at this school and say, they smoke pot
and they do not. You can see this by the way they talk, the way they dress,
the way they act, the music they listen to. Grateful Dead is becoming really
big. Fish is really big among certain crowds . . . . The freshman crop this
year is a bunch of little grunge puppies. They dress like grunge look, are into
the crazy hair.
This same student, however, interviewed with a close-knit group of friends who
had formed around school theater productions, was bothered by the stereotypes
others formed of his own group and the simplistic assumptions that were made
based on their dress and demeanor. This group disliked being stereotyped as
‘‘slackers, people who do not do anything’’ and pointed out that one of their
members was in all AP classes, even though ‘‘he may look like a long-haired
freak . . . . This doesn’t mean anything about our grades.’’ These contradic-
tions—the ability to quickly categorize others, but the need to see oneself and
ones’ own group as more complex and multifaceted—seemed to characterize
much of adolescent thinking about groups and cliques.
Many students professed not to be a part of any group, and there seemed to be
some pride in being independent enough to resist easy identification as a member
of the more dichotomous groupings. As one white male sophomore stated:
‘‘Prep—you are very nicely dressed, and grunge, which is trying not to care and
trying to be odd, and there is always the people who are not trying too much
to identify with a group. I hope I fall into that category.’’