Abstract
We examine the moderating role of friendship and school network characteristics in relationships between 1) youths’ friends smoking behavior and youths’ own generalized expectancies regarding risk and future orientation and 2) generalized expectancies of youths’ friends and youths’ own generalized expectancies. We then relate these constructs to smoking. Using a longitudinal sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 15,142), the relationship between friends’ generalized expectancies and youths’ expectancies is stronger for those more central in the network, with more reachability, or stronger network ties, and weaker for those with denser friendship networks. Risk expectancies exhibited an inverted U shaped relationship with smoking at the next time point, whereas future orientation expectancies displayed a nonlinear accelerating negative relationship. There was also a feedback effect in which smoking behavior led to higher risk expectancies and lower future orientation expectancies in instrumental variable analyses.
Highlights
Numerous studies have examined the relationship between social network characteristics and various health and risk behaviors across populations [1,2,3]
The present study considers whether adolescents’ cognitive expectancies, in part developed within their peer networks, have consequences for subsequent smoking behavior
We describe the rationale for the expectancies, network characteristics and pathways under study
Summary
Numerous studies have examined the relationship between social network characteristics and various health and risk behaviors across populations [1,2,3]. A voluminous and growing body of literature has yielded keen insights into pathways linking adolescent social networks and risk behaviors including smoking; notably studies utilizing Stochastic Actor-Based Models [4, 5] have elucidated linkages between degree based, triadic, and other network effects and both friendship tie choice and adolescent smoking, for example [6,7,8,9]. Adolescent Networks, Expectancies and Smoking preparation of the manuscript
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