Health and the structure of adolescent social networks

Much research has explored the role of social networks in promoting health through the provision of social support. However, little work has examined how social networks themselves may be structured by health. This article investigates the link between individuals' health and the characteristics of their social network positions. We first develop theoretical predictions for how health may influence the structure of adolescent networks. We then test these predictions using longitudinal analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We find important relationships between the health status of adolescents and the characteristics of the social network positions within which they are embedded. Overall we find that adolescents in poor health form smaller local networks and occupy less central global positions than their healthy peers. These results also have implications for social network research, expanding the scope of factors responsible for the network positions individuals occupy.     

Drinking, socioemotional functioning, and academic progress in secondary school

Secondary schools are sites of academic instruction but also contexts of socioemotional development, and the intertwining of these two functions has consequences for adolescents' future health and education. Drawing on nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 8,271), this study explored the bidirectional associations among indicators of adolescents' alcohol use and their feelings of social integration at school. Socioemotional problems did not predict increased drinking over time, but drinking predicted declining socioemotional functioning, with negative implications for adolescents' academic grades by the end of high school. These associations, however, were conditioned by aspects of school context, with drinkers feeling more marginalized in schools characterized by dense networks with low rates of drinking.     

The Role of School Contexts in Adolescents' Weight‐loss Behaviors and Self‐perceptions of Overweight

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and multilevel modeling, this study investigates the role high school social contexts play in the development of adolescents' weight‐loss behaviors and overweight self‐perceptions. Overall, the results indicate that there is an important association between adolescents' weight‐loss behaviors and self‐perceptions of overweight and the weight‐related context of their school. For example, both adolescent boys and girls are less likely to engage in weight‐loss behaviors when overweight is prevalent among their same‐sex schoolmates. However, gender differences are also found. For example, while adolescent boys' self‐perceptions of overweight are significantly associated with their same‐sex schoolmates' characteristics and behaviors, this is not the case for adolescent girls. Overall, these findings suggest that meso‐level social contexts—such as schools—may be particularly important to how individuals incorporate macro‐level beliefs or values—such as gendered body ideals—into their own behaviors and self‐concepts.     

Social Closure and Educational Attainment

This article examines how network closure among parents affects adolescents’ educational attainment. First, we introduce a distinction between informal closure and school‐based closure. Second, we investigate whether and how the effect of informal and school‐based parental network closure varies across social contexts. Findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and multilevel models show that parental network closure modestly impacts educational outcomes. Moreover, educational benefits of informal closure in parent networks are contingent on social context. Closure only benefits educational attainment in low‐poverty schools. In high‐poverty schools, informal closure in parent networks lowers educational attainment. The social closure generated in informal connections among parents thereby contributes to the encapsulation of disadvantage in areas of concentrated poverty, which is not the case for school‐based closure.     

Precursors of Running Away During Adolescence: Do Peers Matter?

Although peer influence is a salient predictor of delinquency, how it operates in the etiology of runaway behavior is not fully understood. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study demonstrates the importance of taking peers into account in understanding the etiology of running away. The findings suggest that peer deviance is strongly associated with adolescents’ decision to run away, independent of social network characteristics and their own deviant and conventional behavior, parental attachment, and school bonding. However, the causal process that links peer characteristics and running away remains unclear. More studies are needed to disentangle the underlying reciprocal and interactional relationships among peers, individual behavior, and social contexts such as family and school.     

Same‐Race Friendships and School Attachment: Demonstrating the Interaction Between Personal Network and School Composition1

Previous research has demonstrated that students are strongly attached to school when many same‐race peers are present. This study extends the literature by considering students’ immediate social environment at school—egocentric friendship networks. I hypothesized that same‐race friendships contribute to school attachment by increasing the amount of support that students receive for their racial backgrounds in direct interactions. Further, the association between same‐race friendships and school attachment should be stronger when the school includes many same‐race peers because the organizational condition increases the ability of same‐race friendships to connect students to the major components of school‐wide networks and reduces perceived racial contrast between friends and nonfriend peers. Statistical analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) provided some support for these hypotheses, but white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students showed somewhat different patterns, suggesting group differences in how students develop and view same‐race friendships. The study highlights the importance of individual agency in navigating the multileveled social environment as well as the ability of organizational contexts to shift emotional consequences of personal relationships.     

The Social Construction of Romantic Relationships in Adolescence: Examining the Role of Peer Networks,Gender, and Race*

Romantic activity is a social psychological phenomenon. Gender, race, and peer networks are key contexts for understanding the social construction of this behavior as gender‐ and race‐based norms structure feelings and behaviors that define “appropriate” romantic activity and peer networks serve as incubators of this activity. With a nationally representative sample of adolescents (N= 8510) drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study explored the linkages among peer networks, conceptions of idealized romantic relationships and actual romantic relationships, and the ways in which gender and race moderate these associations. Several characteristics of peer networks predicted adolescent attitudes about romantic behaviors as well as actual romantic behavior. Moreover, the linkages among peer networks, romantic attitudes, and romantic behaviors varied by race.     

Differential predictors of academic achievement: individual and familial factor interactions with community poverty

We present an analysis of the contexts within which adolescents graduate from high school and enroll in college. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health show that adolescents’ school engagement, maternal academic monitoring, and community poverty significantly interact to explain differences in high school graduation and college enrollment rates (n?=?7100). To examine this association, we performed weighted logistic regression analyses, controlling for gender, race, block level unemployment, and block level median income. Findings suggest that protective factors can help youth overcome the challenges associated with community poverty and achieve academically in low and medium levels of poverty, but that youth in high-poverty contexts may need more resources to reach higher levels of academic attainment.     

MORAL COMMUNITIES AND ADOLESCENT DELINQUENCY:

This study bridges the sociological subdisciplines of religion and criminology and examines whether religious characteristics of groups and social contexts might profitably augment social disorganization theory, providing a morally and socially organizing force in a community. Building on the "moral communities" thesis of Rodney Stark (1996), I test whether religion, when understood as a group property, is linked significantly with lower delinquency among individuals in schools and counties where select religious characteristics are high. Moreover, I also examine whether—as Stark suggests—the efficacy of individual religious traits is heightened in social environments where religiousness is more pronounced. Employing multilevel regression models, I test several hypotheses using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. While individual religious effects remain strongest, conservative Protestant homogeneity in both countries and schools corresponds with lower theft and minor delinquency counts. Additionaly, such religious homogeneity interacts with individual-level measures of conservative Protestantism, further reducing incidence (especially of theft). I explore the mechanisms by which communities' religious characteristics likely influence individual behavior and conclude that religion is a neglected yet potentially important cultural aspect of social organization in communities.     

Seasonality of Sexual Debut

This study brings together insights from two bodies of scholarship that have heretofore existed as parallel research literatures, namely, research on the social antecedents of sexual debut and scholarship on the seasonality of coital activity. The authors use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to discover two seasonal peaks in the reported onset of first intercourse, one in the early summertime months for adolescents in general (the summer effect) and another during December for romantically involved adolescents (the holiday season effect). The authors explore the social contours of these patterns by analyzing the effects of gender, race, and partner relationship context (romantic vs. nonromantic) on each peak. Summertime debuts typically occur between nonromantic partners, and wintertime debuts typically occur between romantic partners.     

The Role of Religion in Parenting Satisfaction and Parenting Stress Among Young Parents

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we examine how religious characteristics affect parenting satisfaction and stress among young parents, and how these relationships vary by gender and relationship status. Results indicate that religiosity is associated with higher parenting satisfaction, and differences across religious traditions are observed for parenting stress. These relationships are generally not moderated by gender or relationship status, suggesting religion influences parenting satisfaction and stress similarly across these contexts. Religion has a generally positive influence on parenting attitudes among young parents—both mothers and fathers—in diverse family structures.     

The Popular Kids Don't Matter: Centrality and Influence on Adolescent Behavior

This study examines the widely held belief that socially central individuals are disproportionately influential in their networks. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, it models the association between four behavioral outcomes and two distinct specifications of the behaviors' relationship to network prominence. This study finds little evidence that sociometrically central individuals are more influential than randomly chosen peers from the same network when predicting drinking, smoking, and sports participation. Students resemble their peers in systematic ways, but it is unlikely that this is because central students serve as a reference for the group or because students adjust their actions based on the social rewards that they observe given their position in a social network.     

Low-Income Students and the Socioeconomic Composition of Public High Schools

Increasing constraints placed on race-based school diversification have shifted attention to socioeconomic desegregation. Although past research suggests that socioeconomic desegregation can produce heightened achievement, the "frog pond" perspective points to potential problems with socioeconomic desegregation in nonachievement domains. Such problems are important in their own right, and they may also chip away at the magnitude of potential achievement benefits. In this article, I report conducted propensity score analyses and robustness calculations on a sample of public high schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. As the proportion of the student body with middle- or high-income parents increased, low-income students progressed less far in math and science. Moreover, as the proportion of the student body with middle- or high-income or college-educated parents increased, low-income students experienced more psychosocial problems. Such patterns were often more pronounced among African American and Latino students. These findings suggest curricular and social psychological mechanisms of oft-noted frog pond effects in schools and extend the frog pond framework beyond achievement itself to demographic statuses (e.g., race/ethnicity and SES) perceptually linked to achievement. In terms of policy, these findings indicate that socioeconomic desegregation plans should also attend to equity in course enrollments and the social integration of students more generally.     

SOCIAL STATUS,ADOLESCENT BEHAVIOR,AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

Education has long been recognized as an institution that plays a prominent role in the reproduction of social class. Children from socially advantaged backgrounds tend to achieve higher educational outcomes than children from more disadvantaged backgrounds. In this study, data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) were utilized to better understand the relationship between social advantage, high school educational achievements, adolescent behaviors, and educational attainment. It was found that individuals from socially advantaged backgrounds had greater high school educational achievements and were less likely to engage in problematic adolescent behaviors, and that these behaviors were, in fact, related to educational attainment. The socially advantaged did have greater levels of educational attainment. Most significantly, it was apparent that the socially advantaged were more likely to overcome low high school educational achievements and problematic adolescent behaviors to achieve higher levels of post-high school educational attainment. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Friends of Siblings

SUMMARY

Using the full siblings and their friends in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we examined two possible processes of friends' similarity: selection/influence and social homogamy. For two phenotypes, delinquency and verbal intelligence (VIQ), self-reports of siblings and their friends were linked by a computer algorithm. Structural equation models were then applied to a 4 X 4 covariance matrix (siblings 1 and 2, friends of sibling 1, friends of sibling 2) for each phenotype separately. The best-fit model of delinquency included only a selection/influence process and no social homogamy process. In contrast, the best-fit model of VIQ supported a social homogamy process. Friends' resemblance in delinquency rates can be attributed to selection and/or influence. However, friends' intellectual resemblance may be due to friends' placements in ability tracks in schools and in other social contexts instead of being a result of a preference for a particular VIQ level.     

Women's Education,Marital Violence,and Divorce: A Social Exchange Perspective

Drawing on social exchange theories, the authors hypothesized that educated women are more likely than uneducated women to leave violent marriages and suggested that this pattern offsets the negative education–divorce association commonly found in the United States. They tested these hypotheses using 2 waves of young adult data on 914 married women from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The evidence suggests that the negative relationship between women's education and divorce is weaker when marriages involve abuse than when they do not. The authors observed a similar pattern when they examined the association of women's proportional earnings and divorce, controlling for education. Supplementary analyses suggested that marital satisfaction explains some of the association among women's resources, victimization, and divorce but that marital violence continues to be a significant moderator of the education–divorce association. In sum, education appears to benefit women by both maintaining stable marriages and dissolving violent ones.     

RELIGIOUS INVOLVEMENT AND EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES: The Role of Social Capital and Extracurricular Participation

Previous research has observed that religious participation is positively related to a wide variety of adolescent outcomes, including academic achievement, but relatively little is known about why this is the case. We focus on a group of related potential explanations for why religious involvement improves educational outcomes. We examine whether religious participation enhances academic outcomes among teens by the way in which it shapes their social ties, or social capital, focusing on both intergenerational relationships and on relationships with peers. We also examine the potential intervening role of extracurricular participation. Using structural equation models to analyze data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we examine the potential role of social capital and extracurricular participation in mediating the relationship between religious participation and academic achievement, dropping out of high school, and attachment to school. We find that religious attendance promotes higher intergenerational closure, friendship networks with higher educational resources and norms, and extracurricular participation. These intervening variables account for a small part of the influence of adolescent religious participation on the educational outcomes in this study.     

The impact of school connectedness and teacher support on depressive symptoms in adolescents: A multilevel analysis

Using data from Waves I and II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), this study examined the association between school connectedness, teacher support and depressive symptoms in a weighted sample of 11,852 adolescents from 132 schools. To account for the nested data, multilevel regression was utilized. The results indicated that higher school connectedness and getting along with teachers were significantly associated with fewer depressive symptoms. Findings offer implications for school social work practice and future research. Suggestions for future research are described and strategies to enhance school connectedness and teacher support are discussed.     

Alcohol Use and Popularity: Social Payoffs From Conforming to Peers' Behavior

Although many economic analyses of adolescents have examined the costs of risky behaviors, few have investigated the gains that young people derive from such actions, particularly in terms of social payoffs for complying with peer behavior. This paper studies the relationship between adolescents' use of alcohol (relative to that of their peers) and popularity at school. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a rich and nationally representative survey with detailed information on social networks. Our findings suggest that adolescents are socially rewarded for conforming to their peers' alcohol use and penalized (to a lesser degree) for increasing their consumption above that of their peers. Male adolescents are rewarded for keeping up with their peers' drinking and for getting drunk. Female adolescents are rewarded for drinking per se, but not necessarily for keeping up with their peers. The results offer new information on peer influence and have implications for substance abuse interventions at school and in the community.