Resistance to Peer Influence - Subject Baseline
This measure appears in the following time-points: Baseline.
Related Construct
Description of Measure
The Resistance to Peer Influence (Steinberg, 2000) measure was developed for this study to assess the degree to which adolescents act autonomously in interactions with their peer group. Participants are first presented with two conflicting scenarios (e.g., "Some people go along with their friends just to keep their friends happy" and "Other people refuse to go along with what their friends want to do, even though they know it will make their friends unhappy") and are then asked to choose the scenario which most closely reflects their behavior. Finally, the participant is asked to rate the degree to which the statement is accurate (i.e. "sort of true" or "really true"). Ten such sequences are presented to the participant, each exploring a different dimension of potential influence: go along with friends, fitting in with friends, changing their mind, knowingly do something wrong, hiding true opinion, breaking the law, changing the way you usually act, taking risks, saying things don't really believe, going against the crowd.
To create an overall resistance score, each dimension is assigned a score from one to four reflecting the particular combination of answers provided by the subject. For example, choosing "some people go along with their friends just to keep their friends happy" followed by "really true of me" results in a score of one, while choosing "other people refuse to go along with what their friends want to do" followed by "really true of me" results in a score of four. This is repeated for all ten dimensions.
A one-factor CFA model was fit to the baseline data and proved to be acceptable:alpha: .73; NFI: 92; NNFI: .92; CFI: .94; RMSEA: 04. Additionally, the alpha for Mexican American youth (N=334) at baseline only is .72.
The syntax for this measure computes one score:
- Resistance to Peer Influence [s0peerpr]; mean across 10 dimensions. High scores indicate less influence; low scores indicate more influence.
In addition to the subscale score above, instructions to compute a summary score that combines scores from the PSMI, FOI, WAI and Resistance to Peer Influence is available. This summary score is called maturity of judgment (MOJ). A separate codebook section describes step-by-step instructions for computing the MOJ score.
References
- Developed for the study by L. Steinberg.