Drawing on theories of social psychology, developmental science, and personality, the present thesis examined peer relationships in youth within several empirical studies. Therewith, I aimed at generating knowledge regarding antecedents and causes of social integration and isolation. In order to illuminate these research questions, I applied a multimethodological design covering social network analyses as well as experimental studies in three subsequent studies. In study 1, I analyzed the

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... on of why adolescents lack social integration. Therefore, social network analyses took a unique look at adolescents' degree of integration. A total of 317 seventh through ninth graders out of 18 classes reported friendship patterns and their respective class teachers provided information on students' social skills. Multilevel analyses showed that indicators of social skills predicted the degree of integration each adolescent had on both the individual and the contextual level. These findings support the importance of adaptive peer relationships, because the degree to which adolescents are socially integrated in class is not merely related to their own but also to their friends' social- psychological constitution. Study 2 was driven by the research objective to uncover the yet unknown social structure that underlies the concept of empathy in adolescence. A total of 3.159 seventh graders from 166 school classes participated by providing information on empathy, related psychosocial factors, and friendship patterns. Social network analyses were used to measure a comprehensive representation of adolescents' social environment by covering individual, group, class, and school characteristics. Multilevel models revealed that individual characteristics as well as contextual factors predict adolescents' level of empathy. Findings indicate that empathy is mirrored in the social structure of adolescents supporting the hypothesis that social demands, which continuously grow with the amount of embeddedness, shape their social understand [...]