Immigrant Integration and Friendship Formation Among Youth in US Schools: A Social Network Approach

Background and Purpose              

Over the next half century, the United States will become more diverse across racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic lines. By 2050, roughly 1 in 3 youth will be foreign-born or children of foreign-born parents.  It is imperative that school communities promote immigrant integration in order to ensure the healthy development of all youth.  The two studies presented here take a social network approach to integration by examining the propensity to form same- and cross-group friendships across race, ethnicity, immigrant generation, and language spoken in the home.  School-level analyses are also conducted to examine how same-group friendship formation varies across school contexts to test for empirical evidence of contact or conflict theories of intergroup relations.

Methods

Data for both studies are drawn from the Wave I in-school and Waves I and II in-home samples of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) (44,772 youth across 63 schools).  In the first study, exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) is used to determine the individual and network-based factors that account for friendship formation with 63 schools from the cross-sectional Wave I in-school data.  In the second study, longitudinal analyses using stochastic actor-based modeling are then used with one school from the sample to model network change over three waves of data.  Analyses are conducted using the statnet and Rsiena packages in R. 

Results

Results across both studies indicate that immigrant generation and language spoken in the home emerge as strong predictors of friendship above and beyond race, ethnicity, and other known predictors of youth friendship formation.  In the cross-sectional analyses, first-generation youth are as much as six times as likely to nominate another first-generation youth as their friend, while second-generation youth are twice as likely to nominate another second-generation youth as their friend, with similar results in the longitudinal analyses.  While immigrant generation and language spoken are strong predictors, gender, race, ethnicity, and network factors such as reciprocity and triadic closure remain the driving forces of friendship formation.  Finally, the tendency to form same-generation friendships decreases as school cultural diversity increases, providing evidence in support of intergroup contact theory.  

Conclusions and Implications

Immigrant integration in school communities is an essential task of ensuring equity of youth outcomes and working toward the grand challenge goal of ensuring healthy development for all youth.  Interventions aiming to foster cross-cultural relationships and decrease intolerance need to examine how both individual factors – like immigrant generation and spoken language – as well as network factors like reciprocity and triadic closure promote or detract from integration. District level policies that impact the cultural composition of schools may in turn promote (or deter) friendship integration within schools.  School communities should consider the complexities of immigrant generation and language above and beyond race and ethnicity to best understand the cultural and linguistic diversities of their communities.