ArticlePsychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors2021
Do alcohol interventions affect peers who do not receive the intervention? Modeling treatment contagion effects via simulations of adolescent social networks.
Article in Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 5 citations in OpenAlex.
- A systematic review of operational research modelling for alcohol consumption and its consequences.Health systems (Basingstoke, England) · 2026Review
- Discovering what young adults want in electronic interventions aimed at reducing alcohol-related consequences.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2024Article
- Dynamic social network analysis of a brief alcohol intervention trial in heavy-drinking college students shows spillover effects.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2024Article
- Social Network Analysis of Diffusion Among American Indian Youth in a Culturally Adapted, Family-focused Prevention Program.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveAdolescents' drinking is influenced by their friends' drinking. However, it is unclear whether individually-targeted alcohol interventions reduce drinking in the friends of individuals who receive the intervention. This study used simulations of drinking in simulated longitudinal social networks to test whether individually-targeted alcohol interventions may be expected to spread to non-targeted individuals.
methodStochastic actor-based models simulated longitudinal social networks where changes in drinking and friendships were modeled using parameters from a meta-analysis of high school 10th grade social networks. Social influence (i.e., how much one's friends' drinking affects their own drinking) and social selection (i.e., how much one's drinking affects who they select as friends) were manipulated at several levels. At the midpoint of each simulation, a randomly-selected heavy-drinking individual was experimentally assigned to an intervention (changing their drinking status to non-drinking) or a control condition (no change in drinking status) and the drinking statuses of that individual's friends were recorded at the end of the simulation.
resultsFriends of individuals who received the intervention significantly reduced their drinking, with higher reductions occurring in networks with greater social influence. However, all effect sizes were small (e.g., average per-friend reduction of .07 on a 5-point drinking scale).
conclusionsIndividually-targeted alcohol interventions may have small effects on reducing the drinking of non-targeted adolescents, with social influence being a mechanism that drives such effects. Due to small effect sizes, many adolescents may need to receive alcohol interventions to produce measurable effects on drinking outcomes for non-targeted individuals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.