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Abstract
We use 9 Add Health high schools with longitudinal network data to assess whether adolescent drinkers choose friends who drink, prefer friends whose friends drink, if selection differs between new and existing friendships, and between schools. Utilizing dynamic social network models that control for friend influences on individual alcohol use, the results show that drinkers do not strongly prefer friends who drink. Instead, they favor close friends whose friends’ drink, suggesting that alcohol matters for selection on the social groups and environments that friends connect each other to. The role of alcohol use differs by whether friendships are new or existing, however, with bridging connections being less stable. Moreover, selection processes, and the implications of alcohol use for friendship, vary in important ways between schools.
Highlights
The prevalence of alcohol use in adolescence suggests that it is an important avenue by which teens integrate socially with peers away from adult supervision
The effect magnitudes are consistent across networks, Model 2 suggests that this approach masks heterogeneity in both alcohol-based selection and the differential contributions of alcohol use to new and existing friend processes across networks
Understanding alcohol use preferences in friendship choices is integral for deepening theoretical understanding of an important social process, social integration, during adolescence
Summary
That it is an important avenue by which teens integrate socially with peers away from adult supervision. The high rates of individual use reflect the fact that teens regularly expose each other to alcohol. The purpose of this study, is to examine the role of alcohol use in the friendship formation (creation of a new friendship) and durability (maintenance of an existing friendship) during a developmentally important stage of life. We address this purpose by applying longitudinal stochastic actor based models of social network dynamics [4] to 9 schools from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health)
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