Influential Adolescents

The INAD (INfluential ADolescents) project addresses an urgent need to understand how to influence adolescents’ attitudes and behaviors regarding key societal problem areas, such as interethnic attitudes, substance use, and environmentally-friendly attitudes. To this end, I aim to identify the most influential adolescents in classrooms who could spread attitudes and behaviors among peers. Studying not only individual-level indicators of social influence but also their interaction with contextual factors could be a key element in identifying the most influential adolescents across a range of contexts and outcomes, potentially solving inconsistencies in the prior literature. Such knowledge would enable the preparation of cost-efficient interventions that would include only a few most influential adolescents, yet, influencing all classroom members. In three interconnected studies, I will investigate how various potential individual-level indicators of social influence 1) identify most influential adolescents across different classroom structures, 2) determine adolescents’ ability to affect the most important norms, 3) taking into account a short and a long-term change in attitudes and behaviors. I will employ computational social science methods, which help to capture complex social processes. In Study 1, I will develop a novel theoretical model based on interdisciplinary research and theories by combining theory-building and agent-based modeling. In Study 2, I will calibrate and empirically test the developed theoretical model using longitudinal social network analysis. In Study 3, I will conduct a computer simulation of how changes in attitudes and behaviors of a few most influential adolescents influence change among all classroom members.