Assessing Peer and Parent Influence on Adolescent Political Attitudes

This paper treats both substantive and methodological issues in assessing agent influence on individual political attitudes. From a substantive perspective, the effect of perceptual accuracy, issue salience, and parent-peer orientation on attitude relationships among adolescents, parents, and peers is analyzed. These variables are found to affect relationships in a similar fashion, but their marginal distributions generally lead to higher correlations between adolescents and parents than between adolescents and peers. From a methodological perspective the link between statistical techniques for measuring paired comparisons and conceptions of influence is analyzed. It is argued that parents and peers can have divergent political attitudes, yet both influence the individual in the same direction.