A Systems Perspective On Adolescent Smoking: Relationships Between Social Network Characteristics, Peer Influence, and Adolescent Smoking

While numerous studies spanning multiple decades suggest a protective effect of social network ties on health, other work indicates that social ties can be detrimental to health and health behavior. Given this competing evidence, one critical step towards a better theoretical understanding of the relationship between social networks and health is to better elucidate the social processes linking network ties and health behavior.  Toward this aim, this study focuses on adolescent friendship networks as a system of social relationships in which adolescent risk behavior occurs, to examine how smoking behavior diffuses through adolescents’ networks.  Specifically, this study will examine how structural and positional friendship network characteristics may work in synergy with peer influence processes in relation to smoking, to explore the risk or protection of peer influence and network structure in relation to smoking.  This study will employ longitudinal Structural Equations Modeling, to examine relationships across three waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which was conducted with a nationally representative sample of adolescents in grades 7 through 12.  Implications for informing both extant theoretical models relating social networks to health behavior and smoking related prevention programs will be discussed.