Cascades of Emotional Support in Friendship Networks and Adolescent Smoking

Studies over recent decades indicate the vital role social support plays in health.  Social support serves varied and vital functions for health and health behavior, with emotional support generally extending to intimacy, attachment, and the ability to confide in and rely on someone, all of which contribute to feeling cared for. Given that peer and parental systems are key actors on adolescent development and youth smoking, this study focuses on the diffusion of the provision of emotional support through adolescent friendship network ties, considering the provision of parental support concurrent with youths’ decisions to smoke in one high school (n=976) from the National Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (AddHealth).  We utilize a Stochastic Actor-Based modeling approach to model the simultaneous provision of emotional support to those in youths’ friendship networks, while concurrently modeling their decisions to smoke.  The findings indicated that emotional support is transacted through an interdependent contextual system, comprised of both peer and parental effects, with the latter also having distal indirect effects from youths’ friends’ parents.  The provision of support to friends depended on numerous network properties, including the number of people youth provide support to, and whether or not support is reciprocated. Findings also suggest a hierarchical, unidirectional, flow of support provision, given the effects of transitive triplets and 3-cycles.  The findings suggest some youth may act as sources of support, while others receive considerably more than they give, and in a non-linear fashion. We also observed homophily effects in the provision of support, with youth providing support to others in the same grade and of the same gender.  Moreover, we observed evidence of parental influences on support provision, with perceived emotional support from a parent and perceived support a youth’s friend received from their own parent being positively related to support provision.  Concurrently, we found that peer influence affected smoking, with youth being more likely to mimic the smoking behavior of friends who provide them social support.   Our findings suggest a social milieu in which support provision cascades through network structures, in a hierarchical and transitive fashion, interdependently with parental support effects, which work through both direct and indirect pathways.