Objective

The current study examined whether an adolescent's standing within a school-bounded social network moderated the association between depressive symptoms and substance use across adolescence as a function of developmental and demographic factors (gender, parental education, and race/ethnicity).

Method

The sample of 6,776 adolescents participated in up to seven waves of data collection spanning 6th to 12th grade.

Results

Results of latent growth models showed that lower integration into the social network exacerbates risk for depression-related substance use in youth, particularly around the high school transition, but social status acted as both a risk factor and a protective factor at different points in development for different youth. Findings also varied as a function of youth gender and parental education status.

Conclusions

Together these findings suggest that lower integration into the social network exacerbates risk for depression-related substance use in youth, particularly around the high school transition in general as well as just before the high school transition in those with lower parental education or just after the high school transition in males. Thus, the risky impact of social isolation appears more consistent across this period. Social status, however, showed a more varied pattern and further study is needed to understand the sometimes risky and sometimes protective effects of social status on depression-related substance use.

In the study of adolescent health, it is useful to derive indices of social dynamics from sociometric data, and to use these indices as predictors of health risk behaviors. In this manuscript, we introduce a flexible latent variable model as a novel way of obtaining estimates of social integration and social status from school-based sociometric data. Such scores provide the flexibility of a regression-based approach while accounting for measurement error in sociometric indicators. We demonstrate the utility of these factor scores in testing complex hypotheses through a combination of structural equation modeling and survival models, showing that deviance mediates the relationship between social status and smoking onset hazard at the transition to high school.

Objective

The relationship between smoking and adolescents' peer relationships is complex, with studies showing increased risk of smoking for adolescents of both very high and very low social position. A key question is whether the impact of social position on smoking depends on an adolescent's level of coping motives (i.e., their desire to use smoking to mitigate negative affect).

Method

We assessed how social position predicts nicotine dependence in a longitudinal sample (N = 3,717; 44.8% male; mean age = 13.41 years) of adolescent lifetime smokers measured between 6th and 12th grades. Using both social network analysis and multilevel modeling, we assessed this question at the between-person and within-person level, hypothesizing that within-person decreases in social position would lead to increased risk of nicotine dependence among those with high levels of coping motives.

Results

In contrast to our hypotheses, only interactions with the between-person measures of social position were found, with a slight negative relationship at low levels of coping motives. In addition, the main effect of coping motives was considerably stronger than that of social position at the between-person level, and social position had no significant within-person main effect on nicotine dependence risk.

Conclusions

These results suggest that adolescents with higher overall levels of social position among their peers may have slightly decreased risk for nicotine dependence, but only when coping motives are low. Counter to expectations, higher levels of nicotine dependence risk were not linked to fluctuations in social position.

The current study examined whether social status and social integration, two related but distinct indicators of an adolescent's standing within a peer network, mediate the association between risky symptoms (depressive symptoms and deviant behavior) and substance use across adolescence. The sample of 6,776 adolescents participated in up to seven waves of data collection spanning 6th to 12th grades. Scores indexing social status and integration were derived from a social network analysis of six schools and subsequent psychometric modeling. Results of latent growth models showed that social integration and status mediated the relation between risky symptoms and substance use and that risky symptoms mediated the relation between social standing and substance use during the high school transition. Before this transition, pathways involving deviant behavior led to high social integration and status and in turn to substance use. After this transition, both deviant behavior and depressive symptoms led to low social integration and status and in turn greater substance use. These findings suggest that the high school transition is a risky time for substance use related to the interplay of increases in depressive symptoms and deviant behavior on the one hand and decreases in social status and integration on the other.