Peer Group Delinquency and Sexual Victimization: Does Popularity Matter? JOHN STOGNER Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA J. MITCHELL MILLER Department of Criminal Justice, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA BONNIE S. FISHER School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA ERIC A. STEWART Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA CHRISTOPHER J. SCHRECK Department of Criminal Justice, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, USA Though a large body of research has found that peer social network characteristics influence both offending and victimization, rela- tively little is known about the influence of social network charac- teristics on adolescent sexual victimization. Attractiveness and sociability largely indicate popularity for teenage females, which in turn leads to earlier onset of dating, greater dating options, and potential risk of sexual victimization—an observation not tested in the criminological and criminal justice literature. We sug- gest and evaluate 2 competing hypotheses: that popularity within a network insulates females from sexual victimization and that popularity may increase exposure to delinquent others and facili- tate sexual victimization. Results suggest that popularity does not have a consistent effect but instead that its role is conditioned by Address correspondence to J. Mitchell Miller, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Texas at San Antonio, 501 C. Chavez Blvd., San Antonio, TX 78207, USA. E-mail: jm.miller@ utsa.edu Women & Criminal Justice, 24:62–81, 2014 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0897-4454 print=1541-0323 online DOI: 10.1080/08974454.2013.842520 62 Downloaded by [Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries] at 08:57 21 January 2015