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The recent popularity of models that capture the dynamic coevolution of both network structure and behavior has driven the need for summary indices to assess the adequacy of these models to reproduce dynamic properties of scientific or practical importance. Whereas there are several existing indices for assessing the ability of the model to reproduce network structure over time, to date there are few indices for assessing the ability of the model to reproduce individuals’ behavior patterns. Drawing on the widely used strategy of assessing model adequacy by comparing index values summarizing features of the observed data to the distribution of those index values on simulated data from the fitted model, we propose four goals that a researcher could reasonably expect of a joint structure/behavior model regarding how well it captures behavior and describe indices for assessing each of these. These reasonably simple and easily implemented indices can be used for assessing model adequacy with any dynamic network models jointly working with networks and behavior, including the stochastic actor-based models implemented within software packages such as RSien version 1.2-24. We demonstrate the use of our indices with an empirical example to show how they can be employed in practical settings, with an additional extension to modeling affiliation dynamics in two-mode networks. Key scripts are provided in the Supplemental Document (which can be found at http://smr.sagepub.com/supplemental/ ).

Adolescent drinking remains a prominent public health and socioeconomic issue in the USA with costly consequences. While numerous drinking intervention programs have been developed, there is little guidance whether certain strategies of participant recruitment are more effective than others. The current study aims at addressing this gap in the literature using a computer simulation approach, a more cost-effective method than employing actual interventions. We first estimate stochastic actor–oriented models for two schools from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). We then employ different strategies for selecting adolescents for the intervention (either based on their drinking levels or their positions in the school network) and simulate the estimated model forward in time to assess the aggregated level of drinking in the school at a later time point. The results suggest that selecting moderate or heavy drinkers for the intervention produces better results compared to selecting casual or light drinkers. The intervention results are improved further if network position information is taken into account, as selecting drinking adolescents with higher in-degree or higher eigenvector centrality values for intervention yields the best results. Results from this study help elucidate participant selection criteria and targeted network intervention strategies for drinking intervention programs in the USA.

Adolescent drinking remains a prominent public health and socioeconomic issue in the USA with costly consequences. While numerous drinking intervention programs have been developed, there is little guidance whether certain strategies of participant recruitment are more effective than others. The current study aims at addressing this gap in the literature using a computer simulation approach, a more cost-effective method than employing actual interventions. We first estimate stochastic actor-oriented models for two schools from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). We then employ different strategies for selecting adolescents for the intervention (either based on their drinking levels or their positions in the school network) and simulate the estimated model forward in time to assess the aggregated level of drinking in the school at a later time point. The results suggest that selecting moderate or heavy drinkers for the intervention produces better results compared to selecting casual or light drinkers. The intervention results are improved further if network position information is taken into account, as selecting drinking adolescents with higher in-degree or higher eigenvector centrality values for intervention yields the best results. Results from this study help elucidate participant selection criteria and targeted network intervention strategies for drinking intervention programs in the USA.

Background: The risk of recurrence of stroke has been found to be modifiable through changes in health behavior and reducing key risk factors such as hypertension. Evidence suggests social networks can influence health behaviors and health outcomes; however, there is a lack of literature on the relationship between stroke survivor’s social network and secondary prevention efforts. In this study, we assessed the association between social network structure and systolic blood pressure (SBP) reduction at one-year post stroke. Methods: Using data from the DESERVE (Discharge Educational Strategies for Reduction of Vascular Events) trial, we assessed the social networks of 552 participants who have had a mild/moderate stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA). At baseline enrollment, participants were asked to identify up to 5 persons, or “alters,” with whom they discuss important matters, such as health. The data on the alters were then classified into structural and functional characteristics. The combination of the number of alters and the amount of alters that met the “optimal” level for each characteristic were used to determine the characteristics of the social network. We used linear regression models to quantify the SBP change on social network characteristics adjusting for age, gender, race-ethnicity, education, marital status, and prior stroke history. Results: Stronger social networks were associated with greater SBP reduction. The overall mean SBP reduction at 12-month follow-up was 5.6 (±24.5) mmHg. On fully adjusted models having 3-5 alters compared to none (mean SBP reduction of 11.4 mmHg, p = 0.01) and having a family and friend network compared to a family-only network (mean SBP reduction of 7.6 mmHg, p = 0.01) were significantly associated with a larger SBP reduction. Conclusion: Social networks may play an important role in blood pressure reduction in patients post stroke. Future interventions should involve social networks to help reduce vascular risk and enhance secondary prevention efforts.

Despite decades of research on adolescent friendships, little is known about adolescents who are more likely to form ties outside of school. We examine multiple social and ecological contexts including parents, the school, social networks, and the neighborhood to understand the origins and health significance of out of school ties using survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N= 81,674). Findings indicate that out of school (more than in-school) friendships drive adolescent deviance and alcohol use, and youth with such friends tend to be involved in school activities and are central among their peer group. This suggests that intervention efforts aimed at reducing deviance and underage drinking may benefit from engaging youth with spanning social ties.

Despite progress made in the treatment and care of people living with HIV (PLWH), HIV-related stigma has remained persistent. Health care settings and workers have been identified as important sources of stigma. Studies have addressed the construct of stigma in U.S. health care settings, but mainly from the perspectives of PLWH. We used Grounded Theory to understand how health care workers conceptualized HIV-related stigma and to develop a model to project a purposive view of stigma in health care settings. Our model indicates that stigma may be rooted in historically derogatory representations of HIV and intensified by power inequalities. Stigma may be triggered by fear, inadequate clinical education and training, unintentional behaviors, and limited contact with PLWH. Study participants perceived stigma as injurious to patient and provider health outcomes. Additional research on provider perceptions of stigma and programs that encourage empowerment, communication, and training may be necessary for stigma reduction.

While studies suggest that peer influence can in some cases encourage adolescent substance use, recent work demonstrates that peer influence may be on average protective for cigarette smoking, raising questions about whether this effect occurs for other substance use behaviors. Herein, we focus on adolescent drinking, which may follow different social dynamics than smoking. We use a data-calibrated Stochastic Actor-Based (SAB) Model of adolescent friendship tie choice and drinking behavior to explore the impact of manipulating the size of peer influence and selection effects on drinking in two school-based networks. We first fit a SAB Model to data on friendship tie choice and adolescent drinking behavior within two large schools (n = 2178 and n = 976) over three time points using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. We then alter the size of the peer influence and selection parameters with all other effects fixed at their estimated values and simulate the social systems forward 1000 times under varying conditions. Whereas peer selection appears to contribute to drinking behavior similarity among adolescents, there is no evidence that it leads to higher levels of drinking at the school level. A stronger peer influence effect lowers the overall level of drinking in both schools. There are many similarities in the patterning of findings between this study of drinking and previous work on smoking, suggesting that peer influence and selection may function similarly with respect to these substances.

HIV stigma is a harmful social phenomenon present in United States (US)-based health care settings. This study assessed the efficacy of a participatory PhotoVoice-informed stigma reduction training program focusing on people living with HIV (PLWH) and targeting health care workers. Seventy-three (N = 73) participants were assessed at baseline (T1), within approximately a week of the training (T2), and at a 3-month follow-up (T3) regarding their HIV/AIDS knowledge, attitudes towards PLWH, and observations of enacted HIV stigma. Findings indicated that the training increased knowledge and improved attitudes (β = 0.56, p 0.01; β = 0.58, p 0.01, respectively) at T2, but these effects diminished at T3 (β = - 0.03, p 0.05; β = - 0.29, p 0.05, respectively). The training did not, however, have an impact on observations of enacted stigma at T2 (β = 0.10, p 0.05) or at T3 (β = 0.02, p 0.05). Additional participatory stigma reduction programs that involve diverse groups of health care workers, offer salient study incentives, include time-saving training methods, and comprise a variety of stigma measures, may be particularly beneficial.

Friendship tie choices in adolescent social networks coevolve simultaneously with youths' cigarette smoking and drinking. We estimate direct and multiplicative relationships between both peer influence and peer selection with salient parental factors affecting both friendship tie choice and the use of these 2 substances. We utilize 1 sample of 12 small schools and a single large school extracted from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Using a Stochastic Actor-Based modeling approach over 3 waves, we find: (a) a peer selection effect, as adolescents nominated others as friends based on cigarette and alcohol use levels across samples; (b) a peer influence effect, as adolescents adapted their smoking and drinking behaviors to those of their best friends across samples; (c) reciprocal effect between cigarette and alcohol usage in the small school sample; (d) a direct effect of parental support and the home smoking environment on adolescent friendship tie choice in the small school sample; (e) a direct effect of the home smoking environment on smoking across samples; (f) a direct effect of the home drinking environment on alcohol use across samples; and (g) a direct effect of parental monitoring on alcohol use across samples. We observed an interaction between parental support and peer influence in affecting drinking, and an interaction between the home drinking environment and peer influence on drinking, in the small school sample. Our findings suggested the importance of delineating direct and synergistic pathways linking network processes and parental influence as they affect concurrent cigarette and alcohol use. (PsycINFO Database Record

Recordings of smartphone use for contacts are increasingly being used as alternative or supplementary measurement methods for social interactions and social relations in the health sciences. Less work has been done to understand how these measures compare with widely used survey-based information. Using data from the Copenhagen Network Study, we investigated whether derived survey and smartphone measures on two widely studied concepts; Social integration and Tie strength were associated. The study population included 737 college students (mean age 21.6 years, Standard deviation: 2.6), who were followed with surveys and continuous recordings of smartphone usage over a one-month period. We derived self-reported and smartphone measures of social integration (social role diversity, social network size), and tie strength (contact frequency, duration and tie reciprocity). Logistic regression models were used to assess the associations between smartphone derived and self-reported measures adjusting for gender, age and co-habitation. Larger call and text message networks were associated with having a high self-reported social role diversity, and a high self-reported social contact frequency was likewise associated with having both frequent call and text message interactions, longer call duration and a higher level of reciprocity in call and text message communication. Self-reported aspects of social relations and smartphone measures of social interactions have considerable overlap supporting a measurement of similar underlying concepts.

© 2015 Elsevier B.V.Recent developments have made model-based imputation of network data feasible in principle, but the extant literature provides few practical examples of its use. In this paper, we consider 14 schools from the widely used In-School Survey of Add Health (Harris et al., 2009), applying an ERGM-based estimation and simulation approach to impute the network missing data for each school. Add Health's complex study design leads to multiple types of missingness, and we introduce practical techniques for handing each. We also develop a cross-validation based method - Held-Out Predictive Evaluation (HOPE) - for assessing this approach. Our results suggest that ERGM-based imputation of edge variables is a viable approach to the analysis of complex studies such as Add Health, provided that care is used in understanding and accounting for the study design.

Social support from peers and parents provides a key socialization function during adolescence. We examine adolescent friendship networks using a Stochastic Actor-Based modeling approach to observe the flow of emotional support provision to peers and the effect of support from parents, while simultaneously modeling smoking behavior. We utilized one school (n = 976) from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (AddHealth) Study. Our findings suggest that emotional support is transacted through an interdependent contextual system, comprised of both peer and parental effects, with the latter also having distal indirect effects from youths' friends' parents.

Background: Human papillomavirus (HPV) is arguably the most prevalent sexually transmitted infection, and has been linked to a variety of health complications including cervical cancer, anal cancer, and anogenital warts. The HPV vaccine can prevent these health complications, but few studies have investigated the specific factors that impact HPV vaccine uptake. Methods: Two hundred seventy-five male and female high school students were surveyed in an ethnically diverse school district in southern California regarding HPV vaccine uptake and perceptions. Results: Less than one third of students reported their physician had discussed HPV vaccine with them, and fewer still for males (p

We examined engagement in novel quit-smoking private social support networks on Twitter, January 2012 to April 2014. We mapped communication patterns within 8 networks of adult smokers (n = 160) with network ties defined by participants’ tweets over 3 time intervals, and examined tie reciprocity, tie strength, in-degree centrality (popularity), 3-person triangles, 4-person cliques, network density, and abstinence status. On average, more than 50% of ties were reciprocated in most networks and most ties were between abstainers and nonabstainers. Tweets formed into more aggregated patterns especially early in the study. Across networks, 35.00% (7 days after the quit date), 49.38% (30 days), and 46.88% (60 days) abstained from smoking. We demonstrated that abstainers and nonabstainers engaged with one another in dyads and small groups. This study preliminarily suggests potential for Twitter as a platform for adult smoking-cessation interventions.

© 2015, 2015 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology.This study uses National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) data to explore the co-evolution of friendship networks and delinquent behaviors. Using a stochastic actor–based (SAB) model, we simultaneously estimate the network structure, influence process, and selection process on adolescents in 12 small schools (N = 1,284) and 1 large school (N = 976) over three time periods. Our results indicate the presence of both selection and influence processes. Moderating effects were tested for density, centrality, and popularity, with only a weak interaction effect for density and influence in the small schools (p

Using data from a study of high risk adolescents in Southern California, U.S.A. (N = 851), this study examined synergy between social network measures of social integration and peer influence in relation to past month cigarette smoking. Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling, results indicated that being central in networks was significantly and positively related to past month cigarette smoking, across all study models. In addition, there is modest evidence that the number of reciprocated friendship ties was positively related to past month cigarette smoking. There is also some modest evidence that the relationship between having reciprocated friendships and past month cigarette smoking was moderated by a network peer influence process, smoking with those in youths’ best friend networks. Findings indicate that being integrated within a social network context of peer influences favoring drug use relates to more smoking among these high risk youth.

We used a systems science perspective to examine adolescents' personal networks, school networks, and neighborhoods as a system through which emotional support and peer influence flow, and we sought to determine whether these flows affected past-month smoking at 2 time points, 1994–1995 and 1996. To test relationships, we employed structural equation modeling and used public-use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 6504). Personal network properties affected past-month smoking at both time points via the flow of emotional support. We observed a feedback loop from personal network properties to emotional support and then to past-month smoking. Past-month smoking at time 1 fed back to positively affect in-degree centrality (i.e., popularity). Findings suggest that networks and neighborhoods in this system positively affected past-month smoking via flows of emotional support.

Strategies to address this potent barrier to treatment and prevention.

BackgroundWe evaluated a novel Twitter-delivered intervention for smoking cessation, Tweet2Quit, which sends daily, automated communications to small, private, self-help groups to encourage high-quality, online, peer-to-peer discussions.DesignA 2-group randomised controlled trial assessed the net benefit of adding a Tweet2Quit support group to a usual care control condition of nicotine patches and a cessation website.ParticipantsParticipants were 160 smokers (4 cohorts of 40/cohort), aged 18–59 years, who intended to quit smoking, used Facebook daily, texted weekly, and had mobile phones with unlimited texting.InterventionAll participants received 56 days of nicotine patches, emails with links to the smokefree.gov cessation website, and instructions to set a quit date within 7 days. Additionally, Tweet2Quit participants were enrolled in 20-person, 100-day Twitter groups, and received daily discussion topics via Twitter, and daily engagement feedback via text.MeasuresThe primary outcome was sustained abstinence at 7, 30 and 60 days post-quit date.ResultsParticipants (mean age 35.7 years, 26.3% male, 31.2% college degree, 88.7% Caucasian) averaged 18.0 (SD=8.2) cigarettes per day and 16.8 (SD=9.8) years of smoking. Participants randomised to Tweet2Quit averaged 58.8 tweets/participant and the average tweeting duration was 47.4 days/participant. Tweet2Quit doubled sustained abstinence out to 60 days follow-up (40.0%, 26/65) versus control (20.0%, 14/70), OR=2.67, CI 1.19 to 5.99, p=0.017. Tweeting via phone predicted tweet volume, and tweet volume predicted sustained abstinence (pConclusionsTweet2Quit was engaging and doubled sustained abstinence. Its low cost and scalability makes it viable as a global cessation treatment.Trial registration numberNCT01602536.

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York.Peer and parental influences are critical socializing forces shaping adolescent development, including the co-evolving processes of friendship tie choice and adolescent smoking. This study examines aspects of adolescent friendship networks and dimensions of parental influences shaping friendship tie choice and smoking, including parental support, parental monitoring, and the parental home smoking environment using a Stochastic Actor-Based model. With data from three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health of youth in grades 7 through 12, including the In-School Survey, the first wave of the In-Home survey occurring 6 months later, and the second wave of the In-Home survey, occurring one year later, this study utilizes two samples based on the social network data collected in the longitudinal saturated sample of sixteen schools. One consists of twelve small schools (n = 1,284, 50.93 % female), and the other of one large school (n = 976, 48.46 % female). The findings indicated that reciprocity, choosing a friend of a friend as a friend, and smoking similarity increased friendship tie choice behavior, as did parental support. Parental monitoring interacted with choosing friends who smoke in affecting friendship tie choice, as at higher levels of parental monitoring, youth chose fewer friends that smoked. A parental home smoking context conducive to smoking decreased the number of friends adolescents chose. Peer influence and a parental home smoking environment conducive to smoking increased smoking, while parental monitoring decreased it in the large school. Overall, peer and parental factors affected the coevolution of friendship tie choice and smoking, directly and multiplicatively.

© 2015 Wang et al. To explore the co-evolution of friendship tie choice and alcohol use behavior among 1,284 adolescents from 12 small schools and 976 adolescents from one big school sampled in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (AddHealth), we apply a Stochastic Actor-Based (SAB) approach implemented in the R-based Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analysis (RSiena) package. Our results indicate the salience of both peer selection and peer influence effects for friendship tie choice and adolescent drinking behavior. Concurrently, the main effect models indicate that parental monitoring and the parental home drinking environment affected adolescent alcohol use in the small school sample, and that parental home drinking environment affected adolescent drinking in the large school sample. In the small school sample, we detect an interaction between the parental home drinking environment and choosing friends that drink as they multiplicatively affect friendship tie choice. Our findings suggest that future research should investigate the synergistic effects of both peer and parental influences for adolescent friendship tie choices and drinking behavior. And given the tendency of adolescents to form ties with their friends' friends, and the evidence of local hierarchy in these networks, popular youth who do not drink may be uniquely positioned and uniquely salient as the highest rank of the hierarchy to cause anti-drinking peer influences to diffuse down the social hierarchy to less popular youth. As such, future interventions should harness prosocial peer influences simultaneously with strategies to increase parental support and monitoring among parents to promote affiliation with prosocial peers.

©Cornelia Pechmann, Li Pan, Kevin Delucchi, Cynthia M Lakon, Judith J Prochaska. Background: The medical field seeks to use social media to deliver health interventions, for example, to provide low-cost, self-directed, online self-help groups. However, engagement in online groups is often low and the informational content may be poor. Objective: The specific study aims were to explore if sending automessages to online self-help groups encouraged engagement and to see if overall or specific types of engagement related to abstinence. Methods: We conducted a Stage I Early Therapy Development Trial of a novel social media intervention for smoking cessation called Tweet2Quit that was delivered online over closed, 20-person quit-smoking groups on Twitter in 100 days. Social media such as Twitter traditionally involves non-directed peer-to-peer exchanges, but our hybrid social media intervention sought to increase and direct such exchanges by sending out two types of autocommunications daily: (1) an "automessage" that encouraged group discussion on an evidence-based cessation-related or community-building topic, and (2) individualized "autofeedback" to each participant on their past 24-hour tweeting. The intervention was purposefully designed without an expert group facilitator and with full automation to ensure low cost, easy implementation, and broad scalability. This purely Web-based trial examined two online quit-smoking groups with 20 members each. Participants were adult smokers who were interested in quitting and were recruited using Google AdWords. Participants' tweets were counted and content coded, distinguishing between responses to the intervention's automessages and spontaneous tweets. In addition, smoking abstinence was assessed at 7 days, 30 days, and 60 days post quit date. Statistical models assessed how tweeting related to abstinence. Results: Combining the two groups, 78% (31/40) of the members sent at least one tweet; and on average, each member sent 72 tweets during the 100-day period. The automessage-suggested discussion topics and participants' responses to those daily automessages were related in terms of their content (r=.75, P=.012). Responses to automessages contributed 22.78% (653/2867) of the total tweets; 77.22% (2214/2867) were spontaneous. Overall tweeting related only marginally to abstinence (OR 1.03, P=.086). However, specific tweet content related to abstinence including tweets about setting of a quit date or use of nicotine patches (OR 1.52, P=.024), countering of roadblocks to quitting (OR 1.76, P=.008) and expressions of confidence about quitting (OR 1.71, SE 0.42, P=.032). Questionable, that is, non-evidence-based, information about quitting did not relate to abstinence (OR 1.12, P=.278). Conclusions: A hybrid social media intervention that combines traditional online social support with daily automessages appears to hold promise for smoking cessation. This hybrid approach capitalizes on social media's spontaneous real-time peer-to-peer exchanges but supplements this with daily automessages that group members respond to, bolstering and sustaining the social network and directing the information content. Highly engaging, this approach should be studied further. Trial Registration: Clinicaltrials.gov NCT01602536; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01602536 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6WGbt0o1K).

Drug injector social networks are a primary social space in which risky needle use behaviors associated with HIV transmission occur, but the mechanisms through which these social networks influence risky needle use are unclear. This study investigated two mechanisms, social support and social regulation, through which injection drug users' social networks might relate to risky needle use behaviors. We investigated how these mechanisms work in three types of social networks, namely, drug user, sex partner, and friendship networks. Data are from a study of HIV risk and protective behaviors of youth and young adults, ages 14-43, in the United States who were injection drug users and/or the sexual partners of users (N = 277). The three types of networks were constructed based on information respondents provided about their drug use partners, sexual partners, and friends. The networks were characterized by structural (i.e., size and density) and interactional (i.e., multiplexity and closeness) characteristics. We conducted tests for mediation using ordered probit models and multiple linear regression. In the drug networks, social regulation partially meditated the relationship between multiplexity and risky needle use (p

©2014 Lakon,Hipp. We examine the moderating role of friendship and school network characteristics in relationships between 1) youths' friends smoking behavior and youths' own generalized expectancies regarding risk and future orientation and 2) generalized expectancies of youths' friends and youths' own generalized expectancies. We then relate these constructs to smoking. Using a longitudinal sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N=515,142), the relationship between friends' generalized expectancies and youths' expectancies is stronger for those more central in the network, with more reachability, or stronger network ties, and weaker for those with denser friendship networks. Risk expectancies exhibited an inverted U shaped relationship with smoking at the next time point, whereas future orientation expectancies displayed a nonlinear accelerating negative relationship. There was also a feedback effect in which smoking behavior led to higher risk expectancies and lower future orientation expectancies in instrumental variable analyses.

This study employs latent trajectory models measuring the level of toxic waste over a decade in the cities of six highly populated, ethnically diverse, counties in southern California from 1990 to 2000 in 3001 tracts. We find that tracts with 15% more Latinos are exposed to 84.3% more toxic waste than an average tract over this time period and tracts with 15% more Asians are exposed to 33.7% more toxic waste. Conversely, tracts with one standard deviation more residents with at least a bachelor's degree (15.5%) are exposed to 88.8% less toxic waste than an average tract. We also found that these effects were considerably weaker when using the raw pounds of toxic waste rather than the toxicity-weighted measure, suggesting that future research will want to account for the toxicity of the waste. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.

INTRODUCTION The contentious debate over the promotion of Swedish snus, a form of moist snuff, as an alternative to cigarettes has often focused on the product's potential as a gateway to smoking. Findings from prospective studies in the United States have suggested that smokeless tobacco (SLT) is a significant predictor of smoking onset, before and after adjustment for baseline covariates. Use of conventional regression methods in these studies may have resulted in biased parameter estimates, arising from imbalanced covariate distributions in the users and nonusers of SLT. An alternative approach, which has been used widely in the econometric literature, matches exposure or treatment levels on the basis of the propensity score distribution. METHODS Using this approach, we matched current SLT users from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health with nonusers (496 pairs) and followed them from adolescence into young adulthood for determination of smoking status. RESULTS Prior to matching, the unadjusted risk of becoming a daily smoker was significantly greater for the SLT users compared with nonusers (n = 10,820; range of relative risk = 1.3-2.0, p < .001). However, after pairing individuals on propensity score, we found no evidence for an increased risk of smoking among the SLT users. DISCUSSION Baseline differences in the risk factors for smoking likely account for the association between the two tobacco products.

A variety of disciplines, ranging from sociology to public health, have struggled with the conceptualization and measurement of social capital. Differences in the approach used to measure social capital may contribute to variations in the observed relationships between social capital and individual and population health across studies. As well, the heavy reliance on communitarian measures of social capital in public health may truncate the field’s understanding of the relationship between social capital and health (Moore, Shiell, Hawe, & Haines, 2005).