Exploring New Mechanisms to Explain How Adolescent Health Shapes Friend Selection

描述(由申请者提供)：这项拟议的研究调查了健康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许多人际关系影响个人健康和幸福的途径。例如，社交网络提供支持，以缓冲压力对健康的影响，加强与健康相关的行为，并作为疾病传播的基础设施。然而，尽管社交网络因素对健康很重要，但研究很少研究青少年是如何获得各自的网络地位的。社会学中关于社会网络的文献以及心理学中的发展和生态观点都为手头的过程提供了信息，但很少被整合。在整合这两种观点的过程中，目前的研究通过测试几种新的假设机制来推动这一领域的发展，健康可能通过这些机制影响朋友选择过程。我们的第一个目标是解释健康状况不佳的个体之间相互联系的普遍倾向。这种关系可能会通过缺乏社会支持和加强不健康的行为来加剧健康状况。其次，我们的目标是确定导致青少年选择行为比自己更不健康的朋友的个人属性。识别这些青少年和潜在的机制至关重要，因为这些新的友谊往往会将青少年重新定位在更糟糕的人生轨迹上。我们的第三个目标是测试参与课外活动是否会缓解上述影响，课外活动通过增进友谊，应该会减少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的统计模型：指数随机图模型(ERGM)和基于随机参与者的模型(SAB)来研究这些目标。拟议的研究结果将为开发更全面和生态上有效的健康和社会网络之间的交叉点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卫生和社会网络相互影响、对健康结果产生长期影响的过程。 公共健康相关性：我们建议通过将社会网络理论与心理学的发展和生态观点相结合，来推进我们目前对青少年健康如何影响朋友选择的理解。我们在三个方面超越了传统的解释：(1)指定解释友谊选择的新机制，(2)调查个体属性在选择过程中如何相互作用， 以及(3)确定环境如何调节这些过程。拟议的研究结果将为开发更全面和生态上有效的健康和社会网络之间的交叉点的理论模型奠定基础，为未来的干预提供信息。

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. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: We propose to advance our current understanding of how adolescents' health affects friend selection by integrating social network theories with the developmental and ecological perspectives from psychology. We move beyond traditional explanations in three regards: (1) specifying new mechanisms explaining friendship selection, (2) investigating how individual attributes interact with one another during the selection process, and (3) identifying how settings moderate these processes. 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.