Abstract
Social network research has evidenced the role of peer effects in the adoption of behaviours. Little is known, however, about whether policies affect how behaviours are shared in a network. To contribute to this literature, we apply the concept of diffusion centrality to school tobacco policies and adolescent smoking. Diffusion centrality is a measure of centrality which refers to a person’s ability to diffuse a given property—in our case, smoking-related behaviours. We hypothesized that stronger school tobacco policies are associated with less diffusion centrality of smoking on school premises and of smoking in general. A whole network study was carried out in 2013 and 2016 among adolescents (n = 18,805) in 38 schools located in six European cities. Overall, diffusion centrality of smoking in general and of smoking on school premises significantly decreased over time. Diffusion centrality of smoking significantly decreased both in schools where the policy strengthened or softened over time, but for diffusion of smoking on school premises, this decrease was only significant in schools where it strengthened. Finally, stronger school tobacco policies were associated with lower diffusion centrality of smoking on school premises and of smoking in general, though to a lesser extent. With such policies, smoking may, therefore, become less prevalent, less popular, and less clustered, thereby lowering the risk of it spreading within networks in, and even outside the school.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all school staff members and students who participated in the study. We would like to acknowledge our colleagues who took part in the collection of the SILNE WP5 data: Jaana Kinnunen, Geatano Roscillo, Pierre-Olivier Robert, and Joanna Alves, as well as the SILNE-R WP8 data: Pauline A.W. Nuyts, Michael Schreuders, Diego Marandola, Teresa Leão, Pierre-Olivier Robert, Adeline Grard, Jaana Kinnunen, Laura Hoffmann, and Martin Mlinaric. We would like to acknowledge the work done by Mostafa Berdii and Adeline Grard on the data management. We would like to thank Alain Guillet and the SMCS-UCLouvain team for their precious assistance with statistics and Laura Jones for the English editing.
Funding
This study is part of the SILNE-R project “Enhancing the effectiveness of programmes and strategies to prevent smoking by adolescents: a realist evaluation comparing seven European countries”, which was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the SILNE-R Grant Agreement number 635056. The Belgian team was also supported by a grant from the FNRS: Crédit de Recherche n°23593456.
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Nora Mélard: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing – Original Draft, Writing – Review and Edition. Adeline Grard: Conceptualization, Writing – Review and Edition. Jean-Charles Delvenne: Methodology, Resources, Writing – Review and Edition. Liesbeth Mercken: Methodology, Resources, Writing – Review and Edition. Julian Perelman: Writing – Review and Edition, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Anton E. Kunst: Writing – Review and Edition, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Vincent Lorant: Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Writing – Review and Edition, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition.
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Mélard, N., Grard, A., Delvenne, JC. et al. The Diffusion of Smoking: Association Between School Tobacco Policies and the Diffusion of Adolescent Smoking in 38 Schools in 6 Countries. Prev Sci 24, 752–764 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-022-01486-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-022-01486-x