Title:	The puzzles of smoking inequalities and social network dynamics among adolescents
DNr:	SNIC 2022/5-363
Project Type:	SNIC Medium Compute
Principal Investigator:	Károly Takács <karoly.takacs@liu.se>
Affiliation:	Linköpings universitet
Duration:	2022-07-28 – 2023-08-01
Classification:	50401 50403
Homepage:	https://liu.se/en/employee/karta65
Keywords:

Abstract

Smoking is the leading preventable cause of premature mortality and morbidity globally. Although smoking prevalence is decreasing, smoking inequalities persist in Sweden as well as in most Western countries. As smoking inequalities emerge during adolescence and persists into adulthood, tobacco control interventions for adolescents are needed to tackle this problem. Vast research showed that social networks are powerful factors explaining smoking behaviour, but it is still unclear how they may contribute to maintaining inequalities. This project will generate new knowledge on how interventions targeting social networks can contribute to reducing smoking prevalence and inequalities among adolescents. First, it will investigate whether socioeconomic and ethnic groups have different norms towards smoking by looking at the co-evolution of popularity and smoking status in different socioeconomic and ethnic groups. Second, it will ask who are the relevant actors for different socioeconomic and ethnic groups who could potentially change smoking behaviour. We use RSiena Bayes that requires high computational complexity to estimate our models.