PEER GROUP INFLUENCE

This article evaluates three models of peer group influence on opinions. Two of these models are eliminated on theoretical and empirical grounds. The surviving model is consistent with the seminal work of French (1956) on social influence processes and provides theoretical foundations for the convention of measuring interpersonal effects with the mean opinion of an individual's set of peers. The model clearly points out the danger of reifying the mean of peers' opinions. Whether or not there is a group norm, the mean of peers' opinions must be viewed strictly as an analytical construction that may be employed to estimate the magnitude of pressures toward uniformity in a peer group. © 1990, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.