Prevailing social network frameworks examine the association between peer
ties and behaviors like smoking, but the role of social isolates is poorly
understood. Some theories predict isolated adolescents are protected from
peer influence that increases smoking, while others suggest isolates are
more likely to initiate smoking because they lack social control provided
by peer friendships. Building on a growing literature that seeks to explain
these contradictions by moving beyond a homogeneous understanding of
isolation, we identify the relationships between smoking and three distinct
dimensions of isolation: avoided (adolescents who do not receive ties),
withdrawn (adolescents who do not send ties), and externally oriented
(adolescents who claim close out-of-grade friends). We examine the
coevolutionary effects of these dimensions and cigarette smoking using an
autoregressive latent trajectory model (ALT) with PROSPER Peers, a unique,
longitudinal networks dataset. These data include students (47% male and
86% White) from rural Iowa and Pennsylvania, ranging successively from
grades 6-12 in eight waves of data. As a robustness check, we use a
stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM) to compare to results from the ALT.
We find avoided isolation and external orientation are associated with
decreased successive smoking in high school, while smoking increases
subsequent isolation along all three dimensions, with particularly strong
effects on withdrawn isolation.