Adolescent health in relation to their peers: likeability as a resilience factor.

Adolescence is a period in which health-related behaviors develop. Peer group influence plays an important role in this development. Some adolescents are, however, more or less resilient to peer influence. We argue that students' likeability amongst their classroom peers functions as a resilience factor in the relation between the health of classroom peers and their own health. We test this by studying 7th grade students from the Taiwan Youth Project (N = 2350) in 81 classrooms, examining the differences in individual and classroom health one year later. The results show that there is indeed a contextual effect of classroom health on individual health, but this effect is weaker to nonexistent, the better liked a student is. Students who score low on likeability are most susceptible to peer influence. The moderation of likeability is only found for boys. Our study shows that likeability is an important resilience factor to social influence and offers insight in how contexts differentially shape individual behaviors.