ABSTRACT
Adolescence can be a turbulent and uncertain time in an individual's life. Adolescents are learning how to negotiate any number of situations on their own for the first time and often look outside their family and home lives for guidance. At the same time, adolescents are developing their own identities, figuring out who they are as individuals independent of their families. As such, peers, in the form of individual friends, cliques of friends, and more amorphous crowds and subcultures, play an important role in the lives of adolescents. The following chapter details the nature of how peers—specifically, peer crowds and subcultures—act as sources of social identity for adolescents, with the focus being specifically on the role of the media in this process.
