Permeable Boundaries of a System: The Relationship Between School Social Networks and Outside School Ties, and the Consequences for Adolescent Delinquency

A body of research has focused on school social networks as representing a system which provides the primary context of social influence for adolescents, carrying important consequences for adolescent delinquent behavior and substance use.  Although this research has provided considerable insights, less work has focused on how the social ties within school networks are related to the social ties that are outside such networks.  This highlights a challenge of systems theory in defining the boundary of what is inside or outside the system.  Regarding the role of social ties outside the school, at least three perspectives can be delineated.  One perspective is that social ties that are outside the school network have no consequences for adolescent delinquency.  A second perspective is that such outside ties are indeed important for understanding adolescent delinquency, but are not related to the adolescent’s position within the school network.  A third perspective is that the presence and functioning of outside ties are inherently related to adolescents’ position and role within the school network.  We explore each of these perspectives using multilevel data of adolescents nested in over 100 schools in the Add Health dataset.  Rather than attempting to model the dynamics within these school networks as is common in the popular Stochastic Actor Based (SAB) approach, we adopt an ecological approach that assesses the relationship between the ecology of the school network, the social environment of the school and surrounding community, and characteristics of the adolescent themselves to assess how such factors relate to the number of ties outside the school network that adolescents have.  We also assess the role of the spatial patterning of adolescents around a school, based on distances to the school and to all other students in the school, and show that it relates to the number of ties outside the school.  We find that whereas students who receive more ties within the school (are more popular) have more ties outside the school, students in a more central position within the network have fewer ties outside the school.  And the density of ties within the school network is related to the number of ties outside the school, again suggesting a relation inside and outside the school network “system”. 

We then assess the relationship between such outside school ties and delinquent behavior.  However, rather than simply testing whether the presence of outside ties matter for delinquency, we ask under what conditions the presence of outside ties leads to more delinquency.  The results provide insights to researchers as they more explicitly consider the distinction of processes inside, and outside, of systems.