Abstract
To explore the co-evolution of friendship tie choice and alcohol use behavior among 1,284 adolescents from 12 small schools and 976 adolescents from one big school sampled in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (AddHealth), we apply a Stochastic Actor-Based (SAB) approach implemented in the R-based Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analysis (RSiena) package. Our results indicate the salience of both peer selection and peer influence effects for friendship tie choice and adolescent drinking behavior. Concurrently, the main effect models indicate that parental monitoring and the parental home drinking environment affected adolescent alcohol use in the small school sample, and that parental home drinking environment affected adolescent drinking in the large school sample. In the small school sample, we detect an interaction between the parental home drinking environment and choosing friends that drink as they multiplicatively affect friendship tie choice. Our findings suggest that future research should investigate the synergistic effects of both peer and parental influences for adolescent friendship tie choices and drinking behavior. And given the tendency of adolescents to form ties with their friends' friends, and the evidence of local hierarchy in these networks, popular youth who do not drink may be uniquely positioned and uniquely salient as the highest rank of the hierarchy to cause anti-drinking peer influences to diffuse down the social hierarchy to less popular youth. As such, future interventions should harness prosocial peer influences simultaneously with strategies to increase parental support and monitoring among parents to promote affiliation with prosocial peers.
Highlights
In the United States, the prevalence of adolescent drinking has declined since the late 1990s— the problem is far from being solved
Theoretical intuition from ecological models suggests that both peer and parental influences might act both independently and in synergy as they impact the simultaneous processes of adolescent friendship tie choice and adolescent drinking
The alcohol use and network descriptive statistics of the 12 small schools and "Jefferson High" are summarized in Table 3. (The distribution of drinking behavior in each of 12 small schools is shown in S3 Table.) Among the small school sample, 52% students reported they were nondrinkers during the In-School Survey, and this proportion increased to 61.1% during the wave
Summary
In the United States, the prevalence of adolescent drinking has declined since the late 1990s— the problem is far from being solved. Despite the declining rates of alcohol use among youth, adolescent drinking remains a key agenda item for the public health community to address. Ecological models [10,11] suggest that multiple contextual influences shape adolescent development and health behavior. Adolescence is a critical time period during which various contextual influences—including those exerted by youths' friends and parents prominently as the primary socialization forces—affecting adolescent development and their health behavior. Theoretical intuition from ecological models suggests that both peer and parental influences might act both independently and in synergy as they impact the simultaneous processes of adolescent friendship tie choice and adolescent drinking
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