Crafting Mosaics: Person-Centered Religious Influence and Selection in Adolescent Friendships Institutional Repository Document

This research addresses the intersection of two key domains of adolescents' lives: religion and peer networks. Religion scholars have argued that religion is multi-faceted and hence better understood by focusing on combinations of indicators (i.e. mosaics), versus a more traditional 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 profiles affect friend selection dynamics. With data from two schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate these 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, our second step is to use stochastic actor based models (SABMs) to investigate network dynamics for these LCA-based religious profiles. We demonstrate how the distinct structure of profile data can be integrated within the SABM framework to evaluate processes of friend selection and influence. Results show evidence of adolescents influencing one anothers religious mosaics, but not selecting friends on that basis.