Research Projects

Adolescent Peer Networks and Health

Several research studies examine how adolescents' positions in the peer social network can have immediate and lasting effects on mental health.  A recent sole-author study in Social Forces investigates how different levels of integration among peers, both as relationships with close friends and the larger picture of how individuals fit into the social environment of the school, relate to depressive symptoms for youth. These projects apply a life-course perspective to understanding adolescence as a critical period for peer attachments and social development that can influence mental health into adulthood. Additional work with Christina Kamis in the Journal of Youth & Adolescence, applies an intersectional lens to investigate how relationships between network cohesion and status characteristics may have a differential impact on adolescent mental health for different race and gender groups.

Other work examines peer networks and self-harm. Copeland, Siennick, Feinberg, Moody, & Ragan, published in the Journal of Youth & Adolescence establishes baseline associations between network positions and self-cutting. In another project, I expand the examination of social network correlates of self-harm to examine the relationship between self-harm and three different levels of friendship patterns in network data: close friends (ego-networks), peer groups, and positions in the entire network (in this case, a sociocentric grade-school network). These projects work to connect theorized mechanisms of self-harm to types of peer network structure in high school, to examine how different characteristics of network positions interact with friends' self-harm behavior and gender to relate to this serious, understudied behavior.  Another ongoing project in this area examines how depression and self-harm are both affected by and in turn shape networks.

Copeland et al. at the Archives of Suicide Research examines processes of friendship, stress, and mental health among youth in Saudi Arabia. This project applies the stress-process and proliferation of stress theories to examine how friends' disclosure of depression and self-harm can present a stressor that influences adolescents' suicidal ideation, net of their own depressive symptoms. This relationship between friends' disclosed distress and suicidality is further shaped by integration in key social contexts, with school attachment moderating observed associations.

Other work flips the traditional lens of examining how networks affect health by examining how adolescent self-rated health predicts network structure. Copeland et al., 2023, published in Social Networks, theorizes that health status can shape networks through two dynamic processes: creating new friendships and maintaining existing ones, based on two dimensions of tie direction: sending and receiving ties. This study uses Separable Temporal Exponential Random Graph Models to find that networks are shaped by youth experiencing poor health being less likely to send ties to create new friendships, indicating a process of withdrawal, with limited support for peers avoiding new friendships with youth who report poor health. Yet, existing friendships for youth experiencing poor health are no less likely to dissolve once created. This work speaks to the importance of considering additional disadvantage for youth who are already facing health challenges, if withdrawal from peer networks limits access to the vital developmental resource of peer network integration.

My work on adolescent social isolation examines network isolates as a unique challenge to the peer influence paradigm of substance use. Isolation is measured in many different ways in the networks literature, but can be divided into three conceptually distinct dimensions: adolescents who do not name any peers as friends, those who are not named as friends by peers, and those who focus their social energy outside of the school setting.

Copeland, Bartlett, & Fisher, published in Network Science, examines cigarette smoking related to three dimensions of network isolation, finding that only isolation based on not being named as a friend (avoided isolation) associated with decreased smoking over time, while smoking in turn increases subsequent isolation from in-school peers. Another study in the Journal of Youth & Adolescence (Copeland, Fisher, Moody, & Feinberg) extends this framework to consider the unique combinations of these isolation dimensions and their association with the use of three separate substances (alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana), finding adolescents isolated from in-school peers are less likely to use alcohol, while teens simultaneously disengaged from school peers and oriented toward out-of-school friends are more likely to use all three substances. This work indicates integration in the school social environment and access to substances are a key features related to teen substance use. Ongoing work examines how different dimensions of isolation interact with feelings of school attachment to affect teens' mental health.

Life Course Consequences of Adolescent Networks

Another stream of my research considers how adolescent peer network experiences can have a lasting impact on adult mental health. Copeland 2021 examines how cohesion and status in teen peer networks relate to young adult mental health, finding that adolescents' mental health status and friends' mental health work in tandem with network structure to shape consequences for young adult mental health. As a result, some positions, such as being highly popular among other popular youth, predict higher depressive levels in young adulthood.

 Kamis & Copeland in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior extends this question by examining how network positions predict trajectories of depressive symptoms decades later.  This work shows that network dimensions have long-term effects on changes in mental health: higher sociality (out-degree) predicts lasting benefits to mental health through lower depressive levels across adulthood, for both genders. Higher popularity, however, presents a double-edged sword for young women, predicting higher depressive symptoms in early adolescence, that then fall more quickly to lower depressive levels in their early 20's compared to their less popular counterparts, before converging to typical depressive levels in their 30's. Copeland et al. in Social Science & Medicine opens the "black box" of this process by examining status attainment in adult roles of employment, marriage, education, and residential independence as mediators in this process. This work shows that while these adult roles do largely mediate associations between adolescent networks and adult mental health, patterns differ across roles and dimensions of networks by gender, and some long-term associations of network structure with adult mental health persist, even after accounting for intervening adult roles.

Ongoing collaborative work in this area considers adolescent networks as a key developmental resource linking childhood experiences and adult outcomes. For example, one study in progress examines how different types of childhood abuse and neglect predict different dimensions of peer network integration in adolescence, with additional work considering gender differences in these processes and subsequent associations with mental health. Other work in progress examines adolescent networks as mediators linking adverse childhood experiences to trajectories of mental health across adolescence and adulthood. 

Older Adults During COVID-19

Another active stream of research examines how networks and social relationships shape mental health outcomes for older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Copeland and Liu in the Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences explores how pre-pandemic social network structure and composition predict needing and receiving support during the pandemic, and another forthcoming study in Population Research and Policy Review (Liu, Copeland, Nowak, Chopik, and Oh) examines marital status differences in pandemic mental health. A study recently published in Aging & Mental Health (Copeland, Nowak, & Liu 2022)  examines how changes in older adults' social participation in the early stages of the pandemic affect pandemic-specific depression. Ongoing work expands this inquiry by considering network dynamics. For example, one study currently in progress examines how pre-pandemic mental health and physical health conditions predict network growth and decay over the acute, early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how these changes in turn predict subsequent health. Together, these studies begin to illuminate how social ties can serve as a resource to vulnerable older adult groups during a global pandemic. 

Networks and Health More Broadly

Other ongoing projects extend the scope of studying social relationships and health. Kamis, Stolte, & Copeland, published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, examines how timing of parental death across distinct life course stages shapes adult mental health by parental gender. Other collaborative work explores the interplay between friendship and romantic ties and predictors of reporting agreement in adolescent romantic ties.

Overall, my research speaks to fundamental sociological questions about how human connections can support health at any age or stage of life and how disparities in access to these social resources can contribute to inequality in health, social life, and well-being.