Véronneau Marie-Hélène, Vitaro Frank, Poulin François, Ha Thao, Kornienko Olga
Departement of Psychology, University of Quebec at Montreal, Montréal, QC, Canada.
School of Psychoeducation, University of Montreal, Montréal, QC, Canada.
J Youth Adolesc. 2025 Jun;54(6):1489-1505. doi: 10.1007/s10964-025-02143-6. Epub 2025 Jan 29.
Because educational attainment is associated with well-being in the long term, it is important to understand the developmental processes that enhance academic outcomes during adolescence. Also, although the importance of friends is well documented in adolescence, little is known about how close friends' characteristics work together with youth's own characteristics to shape adolescents' educational trajectories. This study fills an important gap in knowledge by focusing on how middle school students' academic achievement and externalizing problems are associated with their friends' achievement and externalizing problems over time, and how these variables predict educational attainment in adulthood. This study innovates by examining developmental cascades involving adolescents' academic achievement, externalizing problems, and these characteristics in their close friends in the context of random-intercept cross-lagged panel modeling (RI-CLPM), which disentangles within-person changes and between-person differences during the three years of middle school. The sample included 998 middle school students (M at recruitment: 12.21 years old; SD = 0.37 years), 42.3% of whom were European Americans, 29.0% African Americans, 6.8% Latinos, 5.2%, Asian Americans, 16.2% youth of other ethnicities, including mixed ethnicity, and 47.3% were female. At the within-person level, only one type of interdomain cascade was corroborated, as youth displaying high levels of externalizing problems reported close friendships with low-achieving friends in the next year. At the between-person level, only the random intercept representing the stability of adolescents' academic achievement throughout middle school predicted educational attainment in adulthood (average of 28 years old). In essence, this study clarifies that the etiological mechanisms leading up to adult educational attainment involve only adolescents' own stable academic achievement, and not their externalizing behaviors or friends' academic achievement and externalizing behaviors.
由于从长远来看，教育程度与幸福感相关，因此了解在青春期提高学业成绩的发展过程非常重要。此外，虽然朋友在青春期的重要性已有充分记载，但对于亲密朋友的特征如何与青少年自身的特征共同作用来塑造青少年的教育轨迹，我们知之甚少。本研究通过关注中学生的学业成绩和外化问题如何随时间与他们朋友的成绩和外化问题相关联，以及这些变量如何预测成年后的教育程度，填补了一个重要的知识空白。本研究的创新之处在于，在随机截距交叉滞后面板模型（RI-CLPM）的背景下，研究涉及青少年学业成绩、外化问题以及他们亲密朋友的这些特征的发展级联，该模型厘清了中学三年间个体内部的变化和个体之间的差异。样本包括998名中学生（招募时的平均年龄：12.21岁；标准差=0.37岁），其中42.3%为欧裔美国人，29.0%为非裔美国人，6.8%为拉丁裔，5.2%为亚裔美国人，16.2%为其他种族的青少年，包括混血儿，47.3%为女性。在个体内部层面，仅证实了一种跨领域级联，即表现出高水平外化问题的青少年在次年报告与成绩较差的朋友有亲密友谊。在个体之间层面，只有代表青少年在整个中学阶段学业成绩稳定性的随机截距预测了成年后的教育程度（平均年龄28岁）。实质上，本研究阐明了导致成人教育程度的病因机制仅涉及青少年自身稳定的学业成绩，而非他们的外化行为或朋友的学业成绩和外化行为。
