Gender-specific Pathways of Peer Influence on Adolescent Suicidal Behaviors

The author explores new directions of understanding the pathways of peer influence on adolescent suicidal behavior by leveraging quasi-experimental variation in exposure to peer suicidal behaviors and tracing the flows of influence throughout school environments and networks. The author uses variation in peers’ family members’ suicide attempts to deploy an across–grade level, within-school analysis to estimate causal effects. Key findings include a gender-specific pathway, whereby girls are affected by their female grademates’ experiences with family member suicidality but are unaffected by their male grademates. These specific pathways allow novel approaches to be used that leverage the gender specificity of the influences within an instrumental variable analysis. The findings suggest large (gender-specific) peer effects on suicidal behaviors in adolescence.