The cultural context of family-peer linkages in adolescence.

By nature, humans are social beings, dependent on relationships with others for their survival and well-being. Family relations are a core component of human experience, but in most societies individuals venture beyond the family crucible sometime during childhood or adolescence to form meaningful relationships with peers. As a result, family-peer linkages are a crucial aspect of human development. There is extensive scholarship about these linkages during childhood, but surprisingly little work on connections between family and peer relationships during adolescence. Moreover, only recently have scholars begun to consider the degree to which and how family-peer linkages are culturally embedded and affected by social and ethnic backgrounds. This work heralds a new era in research on connections between adolescents’ peer and family worlds. Such research requires awareness of the limitations of previous scholarship as well as understanding of the many ways in which family and peer relationships may intersect in adolescence. Likewise, researchers must be attentive to the variety of ways in which ethnicity or culture has been conceptualized or operationalized in social scientific research. In this chapter we consider these issues and then present a set of general principles that can guide future investigations of family-peer linkages in adolescence.