Adolescent Psychology: Social Identification, Peer Crowds, and Crowd Affiliation

Adolescent Psychology
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My Thoughts About the Article
The article was easy to read because the article in the abstract highlights what the article is about. The article made sense to me because, as an older adolescent, the article enlightened me on how peers can have a significant impact on how an adolescent behaves in many different areas of their life, including how they dress, speak, use drugs, behave sexually, accept violence, embrace criminal and anti-social behaviors, and many other things. In addition, the findings reiterated that crowds might depict a specific risk factor for problematic behaviors amongst adolescents maintaining or increasing strong identities, with crowds modeling undesirable behaviors or being downplayed by a significant share of the youth populations. Accordingly, the findings highlighted the significance of evaluating peer crowd identification as well as its relation to problematic behavioral tendencies from the developmental notion. I concur with the author’s conclusion that adolescent problem behaviors are developmentally tied to peer crowd identifications (Doornwaard et al., 2012). People’s overall welfare and behavior are known to be significantly influenced by their social connections, especially youth.
Social identification, which can be operationalized as a teen’s subjective sense of belonging, is one potential factor in the relationship between social relationships and subsequent behavior. Young people’s behavior is partly shaped by their social identification with their peer group. Since teens behave as per their social identity, teens who belong to a group that engages in risky conduct are more prone to partake in those risky conduct. Therefore, I concur with the authors’ classification of the various peer groups based on the risky behaviors the teenagers engaged in. In addition, the authors recognized the need for further investigations to establish multiple moderating factors in terms of the developmental connection between problematic behaviors and peer crowd identification. This was significant because the ability of a researcher to recognize their vulnerabilities offers an avenue to conduct additional research to fill the existing research gaps and contribute to the limited knowledge on the subject matter.
The Adolescent I Interviewed Thoughts on the Different Peer Groups in the Article
The adolescent I identified in the article agreed that various peer groups exist. She did, however, remark that there are more peer groups outside those described in the essay. According to her, the mainstream teen crowds are labeled as intelligent, academics, normal, or homebodies. Popul...