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Using Social Network Analysis To Examine The Intersection Of Adolescent Friendships And Health Behavior, Emily Long

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Adolescence marks a vulnerable developmental period for health behavior, and research demonstrates that social context and interpersonal relationships impact the health behavior choices of adolescents. In addition, theories of adolescent development suggest a bidirectional relationship between environmental factors, including social relationships, and health. Friendships are one of the most salient relationships during adolescence, and new methods from the field of social network analysis allow researchers to explicitly examine the mechanisms through which friends influence health behavior, and simultaneously, how health and health behavior impacts the formation of friendships. Importantly, social network methods (e.g., stochastic actor-based models, exponential random graph models) …