ASNAC2019で発表を行います
2019年11月28日～29日にかけて開催されるThe 4th Australian Social Network Analysis Conference (ASNAC 2019) (Adelaide, Australia) で以下の発表を行います。
Oral Presentation
Igarashi, T. (2019). Loneliness may be contagious, but among the non-lonely: A longitudinal analysis of social influence process in large adolescent friendship networks. Paper presented at the 4th Australian Social Network Analysis Conference, Adelaide, Australia.
Previous research (Cacioppo, Fowler, & Christakis, 2009) argues that loneliness is contagious in a social circle through the transmission of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral habits from one to another. However, the proposed evidence is not adequate to conclude the social contagion process of loneliness in several aspects, such as the inappropriateness of the statistical model to analyze relational data, the dyadic, not sociometric, nature of the dataset, and the less attention to moderation effects of one’s level of loneliness on the susceptibility to others’ loneliness. The current study applied Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models to large high-school friendship network data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine the social influence (i.e. contagion) process on loneliness, or the interplay between the friendship network development and the change in loneliness among adolescents across the waves. Under controlling for the social selection process of loneliness as well as several covariate factors such as sex, race, depression, and obesity on tie formation, the analysis yielded a finding that the social influence effect of loneliness was not commonly observed across schools. A significant average similarity effect was obtained at one large school, and supplementary analysis according to actors’ and peers’ levels of loneliness revealed that loneliness contagion was observed especially among those who had similar levels of loneliness. In addition, there was a moderation effect of loneliness contagion: the spread of “non-loneliness” among those who had never or rarely felt loneliness was more likely than the spread of loneliness among those who had always had that feeling. The current findings give crucial evidence that the non-lonely feeling is more contagious among peers than the lonely feeling and suggest the importance of distinguishing loneliness from other social delinquent behaviors that have been found to be contagious in a social setting.
