Friends, Family, and Community Influences on Adolescent Development: A Review of Impactful Findings from the ABCD Study®.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM (ABCD) Study was funded to investigate adolescent development across 10 + years, assessing multilevel social contexts of influence and adolescent health outcomes. As such, the ABCD study has generated a large body of literature investigating adolescent health outcomes in neurocognition, mental health, physical health and substance use. However, the extent to which family, peer, and community contexts are measured and integrated across these outcomes has not been systematically examined. We synthesized 64 articles, deemed to be of high impact using a variety of metrics, to determine the extent to which measures within the Family, Friends, and Community (FFC) domains, across multi-level contexts of identity and values, family, and peers and community were investigated in relation to adolescent health outcomes. FFC measures were most frequently examined in relation to neuroimaging and neurocognitive outcomes, as well as mental health outcomes, with substantially fewer studies incorporating FFC measures for physical health and substance use outcomes, identifying FFC measures as both risk and protective factors. The ABCD study literature to date underscores the central role of FFC measures in contextualizing neurocognitive development as well as other health outcomes during adolescence, primarily with cross-sectional data. Building on existing use of FFC measures in neuroimaging and neurocognitive studies, future research can leverage longitudinal ABCD data to better understand how proximal social contexts shape neurocognitive development across adolescence.