Description excerpt of 50 girls from 'Teenage Friends and Lifestyle Study' data

This is an excerpt of 50 girls from the Teenage Friends and Lifestyle Study data set. The excerpt is made just for purposes of illustration, to provide a small data set of dynamics of networks and behavior for which SIENA can provide estimates relatively quickly. This is not a properly delineated network, and it should not be used for other purposes than numerical illustration.

Download the data set.

Background

The social network data were collected in the Teenage Friends and Lifestyle Study (West and Sweeting 1995, Michell and Amos 1997, Pearson and Michell 2000, Pearson and West 2003). Friendship network data and substance use were recorded for a cohort of pupils in a school in the West of Scotland. The panel data were recorded over a three year period starting in 1995, when the pupils were aged 13, and ending in 1997. A total of 160 pupils took part in the study, 129 of whom were present at all three measurement points. The friendship networks were formed by allowing the pupils to name up to twelve best friends. Pupils were also asked about substance use and adolescent behavior associated with, for instance, lifestyle, sporting behavior and tobacco, alcohol and cannabis consumption. The question on sporting activity asked if the pupil regularly took part in any sport, or go training for sport, out of school (e.g. football, gymnastics, skating, mountain biking). The school was representative of others in the region in terms of social class composition (Pearson and West 2003).

Coding

The friendship networks are in adjacency format in the files s50-network1.dat to s50-network3.dat and in Pajek format in the files s50-d01.net to s50-d01.net.

The behavioral variables were coded as follows. All of these are changing actor covariates. The first four refer to the three time points. The last (family event) refers to changes between each time point and the next, and therefore has two columns only.

• s50-smoke.dat. Smoking: 1 (non), 2 (occasional) and 3 (regular, i.e. more than once per week).
• s50-drugs.dat. Cannabis use: 1 (non), 2 (tried once), 3 (occasional) and 4 (regular).
• s50-alcohol.dat. Alcohol: 1 (non), 2 (once or twice a year), 3 (once a month), 4 (once a week) and 5 (more than once a week).
• s50-sport.dat. Sport: 1 (not regular) and 2 (regular).
• s50-familyevent.dat. Binary information over whether or not the number of persons has changed with which the pupil shares his home address.

References

• Michell, L., and A. Amos (1997). Girls, pecking order and smoking. Social Science and Medicine, 44, 1861 - 1869.
• Pearson, M.A., and L. Michell. 2000. Smoke Rings: Social network analysis of friendship groups, smoking and drug-taking. Drugs: education, prevention and policy, 7, 21-37.
• Pearson, M., and P. West. 2003. Drifting Smoke Rings: Social Network Analysis and Markov Processes in a Longitudinal Study of Friendship Groups and Risk-Taking. Connections, 25(2), 59-76.
• Pearson, Michael, Steglich, Christian, and Snijders, Tom. Homophily and assimilation among sport-active adolescent substance users. Connections 27(1), 47-63. 2006.
• Steglich, C.E.G., Snijders, T.A.B. and West, P. (2006), Applying SIENA: An illustrative analysis of the co-evolution of adolescents' friendship networks, taste in music, and alcohol consumption.
  Methodology, 2, 48-56.
• West, P. and Sweeting, H. (1995) Background Rationale and Design of the West of Scotland 11-16 Study. Working Paper No. 52. MRC Medical Sociology Unit Glasgow.