Do the cool kids drink more? Are they influencing your kid to drink? Apparently, yes.
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Dr. Robert Faris: The other thing that I think is probably worth mentioning is the stuff we did with Andrea on using the Sienna models, which allow us to disentangle... The backdrop of this is that if you look at a social network of friendships in a school...if you color the nodes by a particular behavior like drinking, you'll see clustering. So the kids who are drinking tend to be more closely affiliated with each other than with non-drinkers. It's not perfect by any means. There's lots of mixing. But you don't know by just looking at the cross section, whether that arose because they're influencing each other to drink or not drink or because their drinkers are finding each other and they were already drinking and they they're gravitating to each other. "Birds of a feather," right? The data we have thanks to some developments on the statistical front allowed us to disentangle those two things and understand how behaviors -- to what extent people are gravitating to each other, and to what extent are they influencing each other? It turns out in almost every case, both things are happening at the same time. But these the data we have from the Context study allowed us also to simultaneously examine status processes and it turns out that kids are are influencing each other to drink in their friendship. So they become more similar if you become friends with a drinker. You're going to be more likely to start drinking yourself. It turns out on top of that effect, drinkers are more popular in a school. So they're getting more friends and then they're, by extension, influencing those friends. So there's two kind of processes. One is that kids are seeing alcohol as a way to maybe augment their popularity. It is in fact augmenting their popularity. So they might be drinking for that reason, but they're also going to be drinking by virtue of like, "Oh that kid is popular. I want to be friends with that kid. That kid also happens to drink and now I'm going to be under that influence" so to speak.
