An application of the Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA) model to adolescent smoking initiation

Authored by Ruoyan Sun, David Mendez

Date Published: 2017

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186163

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

We investigated the impact of peers' opinions on the smoking initiation process among adolescents. We applied the Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA) model to study how social interactions change adolescents' opinions and behaviors about smoking. Through agent-based modeling (ABM), we simulated a population of 2500 adolescents and compared smoking prevalence to data from 9 cohorts of adolescents in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) from year 2001 till 2014. Our model adjusts well for NSDUH data according to pseudo R-2 values, which are at least 96\%. Optimal parameter values indicate that adolescents exhibit imitator characteristics with regard to smoking opinions. The imitator characteristics suggests that teenagers tend to update their opinions consistently according to what others do, and these opinions later translate into smoking behaviors. As a result, peer influence from social networks plays a big role in the smoking initiation process and should be an important driver in policy formulation.

Tags

Dynamics Network cessation Social-influence Tobacco smoking