Exploring New Mechanisms to Explain How Adolescent Health Shapes Friend Selection

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究旨在探讨健康状况如何影响青少年社交网络中的朋友选择行为。先前的研究已经记录了人际关系影响个人健康和幸福的许多途径。例如，社交网络提供支持，以缓冲压力对健康的影响，加强与健康有关的行为，并作为疾病传播的基础设施。然而，尽管社会网络因素对健康很重要，但研究很少调查青少年如何获得各自的网络位置。社会学的社会网络研究和心理学的发展与生态研究都揭示了这一过程，但很少进行整合。在整合这两种观点的过程中，目前的研究通过测试健康可能影响朋友选择过程的几个新的假设机制，推动了这一领域的发展。我们的第一个目标是解释健康状况不佳的人彼此交往的共同趋势。这种关系会因缺乏社会支持和强化不健康行为而使健康状况恶化。其次，我们的目标是找出导致青少年选择行为比自己更不健康的朋友的个人属性。确定这些青少年和潜在的机制是至关重要的，因为这些新的友谊往往使青少年重新进入更糟糕的生活轨迹。我们的第三个目的是测试上述影响是否会被参与课外活动所缓和，课外活动通过促进友谊，应该会减弱健康状况不佳对朋友选择的负面影响。我们使用来自国家青少年健康纵向研究的数据和两个前沿统计模型：指数随机图模型（ERGM）和随机行动者模型（SAB）来研究这些目标。拟议研究的结果将为发展更全面和生态有效的健康和社会网络之间交叉的理论模型奠定基础，为未来的干预提供信息。我们的最终目标是了解健康和社会网络相互影响的过程，并对健康结果产生长期影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed research investigates how health affects friend selection behavior in adolescent social networks. Prior research has documented numerous pathways through which relationships affect individual health and well-being. For instance, social networks offer support to buffer the impact of stress on health, reinforce health-related behavior, and serve as the infrastructure for disease transmission. Yet despite the importance of social network factors for health, research has rarely examined how adolescents acquire their respective network positions. The literatures on social networks in sociology and the developmental and ecological perspectives from psychology both inform the processes at hand, but have rarely been integrated. In integrating these two perspectives, the current research advances the field by testing several new hypothesized mechanisms by which health may affect the friend selection process. Our first aim is to explain the common tendency for individuals in poor health to associate with one another. Such relationships can exacerbate health conditions through the absence of social support and by reinforcing unhealthy behavior. Second, we aim to identify individual attributes that lead adolescents to select friends whose behavior is more unhealthy than their own. Identifying these adolescents and potential mechanisms is vital as these new friendships often reposition adolescents on a worse life course trajectory. Our third aim is to test whether the preceding effects are moderated by involvement in extracurricular activities, which, by promoting friendships, should dampen the negative effects of poor health on friend selection. We investigate these aims using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and two cutting-edge statistical models: the Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) and the Stochastic Actor Based (SAB) model. The results of the proposed research will lay the groundwork for developing more comprehensive and ecologically-valid theoretical models of the intersection between health and social networks to inform future interventions. Our ultimate goal is to understand the processes through which health and social networks mutually affect one another, with long-term consequences for health outcomes.