Friends’ Delinquent Behavior— Peer Deviance Scale

Abstract

The Friends’ Delinquent Behavior— Peer Deviance Scale is a highly focused, 10-item self-report questionnaire designed to quantitatively assess the degree of association between an individual adolescent and peers who engage in delinquent behavior. Primarily developed by the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG), this instrument captures the frequency of various minor and major offenses committed by the respondent’s closest friends over a three-month recall period. The scale functions as a crucial measure of environmental risk, effectively quantifying the mechanism of peer influence and its predictive utility concerning the respondent’s own trajectory toward externalizing or antisocial behaviors. Widely used in major longitudinal studies, the scale has consistently demonstrated strong psychometric properties, establishing it as both reliable and valid for youth populations.

Keywords

Peer deviancy, delinquency, youth violence, adolescents, peer influence, social learning, externalizing behavior, CPPRG, risk assessment, antisocial behavior, criminology, psychometrics.

Authors

Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG), Multisite Violence Prevention Project

Purpose

The core objective of the Friends’ Delinquent Behavior— Peer Deviance Scale is to rigorously quantify the extent of an adolescent’s association with deviant peers. This measurement is indispensable within developmental psychology and criminology, as it offers a critical understanding of the immediate social and environmental context surrounding youth behavior and misconduct. By specifically targeting the frequency of various offenses—ranging across status offenses, substance use, and severe violent acts—among self-identified close associates, the scale provides a robust, quantitative assessment of a primary environmental risk factor for the initiation and maintenance of delinquent behavior.

The scale is purposefully constructed to capture the powerful mechanism of peer influence, which posits that close association with friends who exhibit problem behaviors significantly increases the probability of the individual engaging in similar misconduct. Consequently, it is a standard instrument in large-scale prevention programs, such as the FastTrack Project, where it is used to longitudinally track shifts in the social environment and evaluate the efficacy of interventions aimed at mitigating negative peer associations.

Construct

The scale measures the psychological construct of Peer Deviancy, which is fundamentally conceptualized as the degree of exposure to and endorsement of antisocial models within an individual’s immediate social network. This construct is foundational to influential theoretical frameworks in criminology and developmental psychology, notably Social Learning Theory and Differential Association Theory. These theories emphasize that criminal and deviant behavior is not innate but is learned primarily through interaction with others, especially those within the close peer group.

The ten items are comprehensive, covering a spectrum of behaviors from minor status offenses (e.g., truancy) to serious criminal acts (e.g., armed assault), thereby ensuring a robust and generalized measure of peer misconduct. Crucially, the scale focuses exclusively on the respondent’s perception of the actions of their self-identified close friends, rather than the respondent’s own behavior, making it a pure measure of environmental risk and association.

Validity

The Friends’ Delinquent Behavior— Peer Deviance Scale is recognized as a highly valid instrument for assessing delinquent peer association among adolescents. Its psychometric integrity is strongly supported by its consistent inclusion in major longitudinal research studies, where scores on peer deviance frequently demonstrate robust predictive power. Specifically, high peer deviance scores reliably predict the respondent’s subsequent self-reported delinquency, aggression, substance abuse, and other externalizing behaviors.

The instrument demonstrates strong concurrent validity, showing high correlation with other established measures of antisocial tendencies and behavioral problems. Although specific correlation coefficients (e.g., Pearson’s r) are typically detailed in technical reports, academic literature broadly confirms the scale’s appropriateness and utility as a strong measure of peer-related environmental risk factors in youth research settings.

Reliability

The scale has been established as highly reliable for consistently measuring the frequency and scope of peer problem behaviors. A key strength contributing to its ecological reliability is the strict focus on “close friends,” defined specifically as those individuals the respondent sees more than once per week. This ensures that the social influence being measured originates from the most impactful and proximal figures within the adolescent’s immediate environment. Researchers across various studies frequently report acceptable to strong internal consistency statistics, such as Cronbach’s alpha, for this 10-item measure when administered across diverse samples of youth populations.

Factor Analysis

The Friends’ Delinquent Behavior— Peer Deviance Scale is conventionally structured and utilized as a unidimensional scale. This methodology means that all ten items are designed to contribute to a single, summed total score, which represents the adolescent’s overall exposure to peer deviance. While detailed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses are accessible through the scale’s technical reports (often published by the CPPRG), the items generally exhibit high inter-correlation, consistent with the expectation that they load onto a single dominant factor. This single factor reflects the generalized nature of externalizing peer behavior, where engagement in one form of delinquency is often highly associated with engagement in others within youth populations.

Instrument

Test Type: Self-report questionnaire (with a parallel parent-report version available)

Format: The questionnaire comprises 10 items rated on a five-point frequency scale. Respondents must first quantify the number of close friends they have (those seen more than once a week) before answering the behavior-specific items based on the actions of those friends over the past three months.

Language Available: English (Primary publication language)

Population Group: Youth and their parents/caregivers

Age Group: Adolescents (typically middle school through high school age)

Population Details: This instrument has been utilized extensively in large, diverse population samples of youth engaged in developmental studies and violence prevention initiatives, most notably the Multisite Violence Prevention Project and the FastTrack Project.

Test Methodology: The scale uses a five-point response scale to assess the proportion of identified close friends who engaged in the specified behaviors during the last three months. The weighted scoring system is designed to amplify the impact of greater peer involvement:

• None of them = 0
• Very few of them = 1
• Some of them = 3
• Most of them = 4
• All of them = 5

The point values assigned to all 10 responses are summed to yield a total score. Critically, higher scores on this scale indicate a greater degree of exposure to, and intensive association with, peers exhibiting problem and antisocial behaviors.

Keywords

Criminology, risk factors, peer group, youth assessment, FastTrack Project, social influence, substance abuse, violence prevention, psychometrics, survey instrument, externalizing behavior.

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Not applicable (Group authorship)

Affiliation Email addresses: Not available publicly for general correspondence.

Correspondence Address: Correspondence is typically directed through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Atlanta, GA, or Duke University (FastTrack Project).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The scale was developed by the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG) around the year 2000 and gained wide circulation shortly thereafter, appearing prominently in the 2004 documentation for the Multisite Violence Prevention Project. Due to its inclusion in publicly accessible government compendiums of assessment tools, the instrument is generally available for non-commercial academic and research use. Researchers are typically required to adhere to standard citation requirements when utilizing the scale.

Reference’s

1. The instrument is published in Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths: A Compendium of Assessment Tools. The original PDF can be downloaded here: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/YV_Compendium.pdf

2. Multisite Violence Prevention Project. Description of measures: cohort-wide student survey, 2004. Available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Atlanta, GA.

3. Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG). Things your friends have done (technical report). Raleigh, NC: Duke University, 2000. Available from the FastTrack Project Web site: http://www.fasttrackproject.org/techrept/.

Items of the Friends’ Delinquent Behavior— Peer Deviance Scale

How many friends would you consider to be close friends? These are friends who you see more than once a week. These are friends who you spend time with and enjoy doing things with. _____(Record number of friends).

Now, in the last 3 months, how many of these friends have …

1. Skipped school without an excuse?
2. Stolen something worth less than $100?
3. Gone into or tried to go into a building to steal something?
4. Gone joyriding, that is, taken a motor vehicle such as a car or motorcycle for a ride or drive without the owner’s permission?
5. Hit someone with the idea of really hurting that person?
6. Attacked someone with a weapon or other thing to really hurt that person?
7. Use a weapon, force, or strong arm methods to get money or things from people?
8. Drank alcohol?
9. Been in a gang fight?
10. Hit or slapped a boyfriend/girlfriend?

(A corresponding scale can be administered to parents. All items are identical, but the lead-in statement is amended to read: How many friends of your child would you consider to be close friends? These are friends who your child sees more than once a week. These are friends who your child spends time with and enjoys doing things with. _________ (Record number of friends). Now, in the last 3 months, how many of these friends do you think have …”)