IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v125y2015icp40-50.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Mental health and social networks in early adolescence: A dynamic study of objectively-measured social interaction behaviors

Author

Listed:
  • Pachucki, Mark C.
  • Ozer, Emily J.
  • Barrat, Alain
  • Cattuto, Ciro

Abstract

How are social interaction dynamics associated with mental health during early stages of adolescence? The goal of this study is to objectively measure social interactions and evaluate the roles that multiple aspects of the social environment – such as physical activity and food choice – may jointly play in shaping the structure of children's relationships and their mental health. The data in this study are drawn from a longitudinal network-behavior study conducted in 2012 at a private K-8 school in an urban setting in California. We recruited a highly complete network sample of sixth-graders (n = 40, 91% of grade, mean age = 12.3), and examined how two measures of distressed mental health (self-esteem and depressive symptoms) are positionally distributed in an early adolescent interaction network. We ascertained how distressed mental health shapes the structure of relationships over a three-month period, adjusting for relevant dimensions of the social environment. Cross-sectional analyses of interaction networks revealed that self-esteem and depressive symptoms are differentially stratified by gender. Specifically, girls with more depressive symptoms have interactions consistent with social inhibition, while boys' interactions suggest robustness to depressive symptoms. Girls higher in self-esteem tended towards greater sociability. Longitudinal network behavior models indicate that gender similarity and perceived popularity are influential in the formation of social ties. Greater school connectedness predicts the development of self-esteem, though social ties contribute to more self-esteem improvement among students who identify as European-American. Cross-sectional evidence shows associations between distressed mental health and students' network peers. However, there is no evidence that connected students' mental health status becomes more similar in their over time because of their network interactions. These findings suggest that mental health during early adolescence may be less subject to mechanisms of social influence than network research in even slightly older adolescents currently indicates.

Suggested Citation

  • Pachucki, Mark C. & Ozer, Emily J. & Barrat, Alain & Cattuto, Ciro, 2015. "Mental health and social networks in early adolescence: A dynamic study of objectively-measured social interaction behaviors," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 40-50.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:125:y:2015:i:c:p:40-50
    DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.04.015
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614002391
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.04.015?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Samuels, S.E. & Craypo, L. & Boyle, M. & Crawford, P.B. & Yancey, A. & Flores, G., 2010. "The California Endowment's healthy eating, active communities program: A midpoint review," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 100(11), pages 2114-2123.
    2. Choudhury, Suparna & McKinney, Kelly A. & Merten, Moritz, 2012. "Rebelling against the brain: Public engagement with the ‘neurological adolescent’," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 74(4), pages 565-573.
    3. Doherty, Sean T. & Lemieux, Christopher J. & Canally, Culum, 2014. "Tracking human activity and well-being in natural environments using wearable sensors and experience sampling," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 83-92.
    4. Bearman, P.S. & Moody, J., 2004. "Suicide and Friendships among American Adolescents," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 94(1), pages 89-95.
    5. Hatzenbuehler, Mark L. & McLaughlin, Katie A. & Xuan, Ziming, 2012. "Social networks and risk for depressive symptoms in a national sample of sexual minority youth," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 75(7), pages 1184-1191.
    6. Ciro Cattuto & Wouter Van den Broeck & Alain Barrat & Vittoria Colizza & Jean-François Pinton & Alessandro Vespignani, 2010. "Dynamics of Person-to-Person Interactions from Distributed RFID Sensor Networks," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(7), pages 1-9, July.
    7. Woodward-Lopez, G. & Gosliner, W. & Samuels, S.E. & Craypo, L. & Kao, J. & Crawford, P.B., 2010. "Lessons learned from Evaluations of California's statewide school nutrition standards," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 100(11), pages 2137-2145.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fu, Rong & Noguchi, Harkuo & Tachikawa, Hirokazu & Aiba, Miyuki & Nakamine, Shin & Kawamura, Akira & Takahashi, Hideto & Tamiya, Nanako, 2017. "Relation between social network and psychological distress among middle-aged adults in Japan: Evidence from a national longitudinal survey," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 58-65.
    2. Pilar Marqués-Sánchez & Isaías García-Rodríguez & José Alberto Benítez-Andrades & Mari Carmen Portillo & Javier Pérez-Paniagua & María Mercedes Reguera-García, 2019. "A Cooperative Interdisciplinary Task Intervention with Undergraduate Nursing and Computer Engineering Students," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(22), pages 1-19, November.
    3. Long, Emily & Gardani, Maria & McCann, Mark & Sweeting, Helen & Tranmer, Mark & Moore, Laurence, 2020. "Mental health disorders and adolescent peer relationships," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 253(C).
    4. Ana Balsa & Carlos Díaz, 2018. "Social interactions in health behaviors and conditions," Documentos de Trabajo/Working Papers 1802, Facultad de Ciencias Empresariales y Economia. Universidad de Montevideo..
    5. Aronson, Brian, 2016. "Peer influence as a potential magnifier of ADHD diagnosis," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 168(C), pages 111-119.
    6. Lin Fu & Yue Fan & Jin Cheng & Hao Zheng & Zhengkui Liu, 2021. "Being Popular or Having Popular Friends, Which Is Better? A Longitudinal Social Network Analysis of Depressive Symptoms among Chinese Adolescents under Major Chronic Stress," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(21), pages 1-14, October.
    7. Sarkar, Kaushik & Dasgupta, Aparajita & Sinha, Multipada & Shahbabu, Bhaskar, 2017. "Effects of health empowerment intervention on resilience of adolescents in a tribal area: A study using the Solomon four-groups design," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 190(C), pages 265-274.
    8. Werber Borut & Baggia Alenka & Žnidaršič Anja, 2018. "Factors Affecting the Intentions to Use RFID Subcutaneous Microchip Implants for Healthcare Purposes," Organizacija, Sciendo, vol. 51(2), pages 121-133, May.
    9. Xiang, Guangcan & Teng, Zhaojun & Li, Qingqing & Chen, Hong & Guo, Cheng, 2020. "The influence of perceived social support on hope: A longitudinal study of older-aged adolescents in China," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 119(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kim, Harris Hyun-Soo, 2015. "School context, friendship ties and adolescent mental health: A multilevel analysis of the Korean Youth Panel Survey (KYPS)," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 209-216.
    2. Brielle Bryan, 2017. "Paternal Incarceration and Adolescent Social Network Disadvantage," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 54(4), pages 1477-1501, August.
    3. Gregory, Steve, 2012. "Ordered community structure in networks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(8), pages 2752-2763.
    4. De Martino, Giuseppe & Spina, Serena, 2015. "Exploiting the time-dynamics of news diffusion on the Internet through a generalized Susceptible–Infected model," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 438(C), pages 634-644.
    5. Kobayashi, Teruyoshi & Takaguchi, Taro, 2018. "Identifying relationship lending in the interbank market: A network approach," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 20-36.
    6. Goldberg, Amir & Srivastava, Sameer B & Manian, Govind & Monroe, William & Potts, Christopher, 2016. "Fitting In or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness," Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Working Paper Series qt9bf631rg, Institute of Industrial Relations, UC Berkeley.
    7. Choi, Seul Ki & Frongillo, Edward A. & Blake, Christine E. & Thrasher, James F., 2019. "Why are restricted food items still sold after the implementation of the school store policy? the case of South Korea," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 161-169.
    8. Andrews, Gavin J. & Duff, Cameron, 2020. "‘Whole onflow’, the productive event: an articulation through health," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 265(C).
    9. Karen Benjamin Guzzo & Sarah R. Hayford & Vanessa Wanner Lang, 2019. "Adolescent Fertility Attitudes and Childbearing in Early Adulthood," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 38(1), pages 125-152, February.
    10. Shearer, Cindy & Rainham, Daniel & Blanchard, Chris & Dummer, Trevor & Lyons, Renee & Kirk, Sara, 2015. "Measuring food availability and accessibility among adolescents: Moving beyond the neighbourhood boundary," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 322-330.
    11. Fabio Caccioli & Paolo Barucca & Teruyoshi Kobayashi, 2018. "Network models of financial systemic risk: a review," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 1(1), pages 81-114, January.
    12. Wong, Joy P.S. & Stewart, Sunita M. & Ho, S.Y. & Rao, Uma & Lam, T.H., 2005. "Exposure to suicide and suicidal behaviors among Hong Kong adolescents," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 61(3), pages 591-599, August.
    13. Ghahramani, Ali & Pantelic, Jovan & Lindberg, Casey & Mehl, Matthias & Srinivasan, Karthik & Gilligan, Brian & Arens, Edward, 2018. "Learning occupants’ workplace interactions from wearable and stationary ambient sensing systems," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 230(C), pages 42-51.
    14. Mark Kibanov & Raphael H. Heiberger & Simone Rödder & Martin Atzmueller & Gerd Stumme, 2019. "Social studies of scholarly life with sensor-based ethnographic observations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1387-1428, June.
    15. Gamze Dane & Aloys Borgers & Tao Feng, 2019. "Subjective Immediate Experiences during Large-Scale Cultural Events in Cities: A Geotagging Experiment," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(20), pages 1-19, October.
    16. Masoud Shakiba & Azam Zavvari & Nader Aleebrahim & Mandeep Jit Singh, 2016. "Evaluating the academic trend of RFID technology based on SCI and SSCI publications from 2001 to 2014," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(1), pages 591-614, October.
    17. Laura Ozella & Francesco Gesualdo & Michele Tizzoni & Caterina Rizzo & Elisabetta Pandolfi & Ilaria Campagna & Alberto Eugenio Tozzi & Ciro Cattuto, 2018. "Close encounters between infants and household members measured through wearable proximity sensors," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(6), pages 1-16, June.
    18. Massimo Riccaboni & Anna Romiti & Gianna Giudicati, 2011. "Co-experience Network Dynamics: Lessons from the Dance Floor," DISA Working Papers 2011/02, Department of Computer and Management Sciences, University of Trento, Italy, revised 28 Mar 2011.
    19. Barmak, D.H. & Dorso, C.O. & Otero, M., 2016. "Modelling dengue epidemic spreading with human mobility," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 447(C), pages 129-140.
    20. Hideaki Sakawa & Fumio Ohtake & Yoshiro Tsutsui, 2015. "Activity, Time, and Subjective Happiness: An analysis Based on an Hourly Web survey," ISER Discussion Paper 0926, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:125:y:2015:i:c:p:40-50. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.