Postdoctoral Scholars Association

Social health, defined as adequate quantity and quality of social relationships, constitutes an essential need for human well-being. Our aim was to identify patterns in social health during adolescence. We applied latent profile analysis on variables describing adolescent peer relationships: the number of friends, experiences with aggression and victimization, relationships with prosocial and rule-breaking peers, and social support. We evaluated three timepoints covering ages 11-14 and explored whether class membership differed by sex. Results revealed four consistent profiles. The first class was characterized by high levels of aggression and victimization. The second class exhibited high numbers of friends. The third class was characterized by having fewer friends, less prosocial peers, and less peer support. The final class uniformly exhibited values close to each variable’s mean. We found that sex was a significant predictor of class at each year, with girls being more likely to be in the normative class. These findings reveal class profiles for peer relationships in a large and robust dataset, providing a template for understanding social health during adolescence. They also indicate that boys are more likely to exhibit deviations over time in social health, be it positively (i.e., lots of friends) or negatively (i.e., aggressive/victimized).