A burgeoning literature spanning sociologies of culture and social network methods has for the past several decades sought to explicate the relationships between culture and connectivity. A number of promising recent moves toward integration are worthy of review, comparison, critique, and synthesis. Network thinking provides powerful techniques for specifying cultural concepts ranging from narrative networks to classification systems, tastes, and cultural repertoires. At the same time, we see theoretical advances by sociologists of culture as providing a corrective to network analysis as it is often portrayed, as a mere collection of methods. Cultural thinking complements and sets a new agenda for moving beyond predominant forms of structural analysis that ignore action, agency, and intersubjective meaning. The notion of "cultural holes" that we use to organize our review points both to the cultural contingency of network structure and to the increasingly permeable boundary between studies of culture and research on social networks.
Objectives
We investigated whether eating behaviors were concordant among diverse sets of social ties.
Methods
We analyzed the socio-economic and demographic distribution of eating among 3,418 members of the Framingham Heart Study observed between 1991 and 2001. A data classification procedure simplified choices into seven non-overlapping patterns; these patterns were matched with information on social network ties. Correlation analysis examined eating associations between four types of peers (spouses, friends, brothers, sisters). Longitudinal multiple logistic regression was used to evaluate evidence for peer influences on eating.
Results
Of all peer types, spouses showed strongest concordances in eating patterns over time after adjusting for social contextual factors. Across all peers, the eating pattern most likely to be shared by socially connected individuals is “alcohol and snacks.” Models estimating one’s current eating pattern based on a peer’s prior eating provide supportive evidence of a social influence process.
Conclusions
Certain eating patterns may be socially transmissible across different kinds of relationships. These findings represent an important step in specifying the relevant social environment in the study of health behaviors to include eating.
There is little agreement among governments, institutions, scientists and food activists as to how to best tackle the challenging issues of health and sustainability in the food sector. This essay discusses the potential of school meals as a platform to promote healthy and sustainable food behavior. School meal programs are of particular interest for improving public diet because they reach children at a population scale across socio-economic classes and for over a decade of their lives, and because food habits of children are more malleable than those of adults. Current research on the history and health implications of school meal programs is reviewed in a cross-national comparative framework, and arguments explored that speak for the need of a new developmental phase of school meals as an integrative learning platform for healthy and sustainable food behavior. Nutritional, social, practical, educational, economical, political, and cultural perspectives and challenges linked to the implementation of healthy and sustainable school meals are discussed. Finally, the need for long-term interventions and evaluations is highlighted and new research directions are proposed.
The present study examines links between civic engagement (voting, volunteering, and activism) during late adolescence and early adulthood, and socioeconomic status and mental and physical health in adulthood. Using nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a propensity score matching approach is used to rigorously estimate how civic engagement is associated with outcomes among 9,471 adolescents and young adults (baseline M = 15.9). All forms of civic engagement are positively associated with subsequent income and education level. Volunteering and voting are favorably associated with subsequent mental health and health behaviors, and activism is associated with more health-risk behaviors and not associated with mental health. Civic engagement is not associated with physical health.
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