Exploring the Academic Benefits of Friendship Ties for Latino Boys and Girls

Latinos make up the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, having increased by 267 percent over the past three decades (Suro and Passel, 2003). This demographic trend has consequences across many sectors of society, perhaps most notably in the realm of education. In the coming decades, Latinos will comprise an increasing proportion of the school-age population in the United States. Yet research clearly demonstrates the stark disparities between the educational achievement of Latino students and their non-Latino white peers (Kao and Tienda, 1995). For example, Latinos have lower test scores across subjects and are less likely than nonLatino whites to take advanced math coursework (NCES, 2005). Together these two patterns, a growing Latino student population and the low academic achievement of Latino students currently in the school system, may inhibit the production of a large highly educated and skilled national labor force. Our study is motivated by a focus on finding factors that work to promote the achievement of Latino youth. Specifically, we turn to a consideration of peers as a source of social capital for student academic outcomes. In so doing, we make a contribution to previous literature in two key ways. First, while some studies have argued that friendships with dominant culture peers provide social capital that promotes the academic success of Latino students (Ream, 2005; Stanton-Salazar and Dornbusch, 1995), we argue that co-ethnic friendships may also positively contribute to academic achievement, albeit for different reasons. We explicitly examine the relationship between the racial/ethnic composition of Latino students' friendship groups and their achievement, and attempt to model some of the mechanisms through which groups of different compositions might foster academic success for Latino students. In considering co-ethnic peers, we further distinguish between peers with regard to generational status, since this may have implications for the kinds of resources that students access via social networks (Kao and Rutherford, 2007). Our attention to the potential for in-group ties among co-ethnic peers to function as a source of social capital for achievement by providing encouragement, support, and a positive cultural identity for Latino youth offers an important counterpoint to literature that assumes that co-ethnic peer groups negatively impact the achievement of minorities (Ogbu, 2003). Second, our study contributes to the need for research that explicitly considers gender differences between Latina and Latino youth in the factors that promote achievement. Specifically, the literature on peer effects among minority youth is surprisingly devoid of attention to variation by gender. Yet social psychological literature has long acknowledged gender differences in the intimacy, support, and importance of friendships among adolescent youth (Eccles, 1994) and, more recently, sociological literature has pointed to gender variation in the consequences of friendship ties for academic success (Frank et al., 2008; Riegle-Crumb, Farkas, and Muller, 2006). These bodies of literature, together with evidence that Latinas may be more likely than Latinos to seek in-group ties as a means of maintaining a positive cultural identity (Barajas and Pierce, 2001), motivate our intent to explicitly examine gender differences in the relationship between friendship group composition and academic achievement. Subsequently, the primary goal of this study is to examine how the racial/ ethnic and generational status composition of Latino girls' and boys' friendship groups is related to their academic achievement at the end of high school and to explore the mechanisms through which in-group and out-group ties can provide alternative forms of social capital for Latino students' achievement. We utilize newly available nationally representative data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study (AHAA), and its parent survey, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), to build on the insights of ethnographic research that highlight the complexities faced by Latino youth in navigating the social and academic world of high school (Carter, 2005; Lopez, 2003; Valenzuela, 1999).