Combining theories of health lifestyles-interrelated health behaviors arising from group-based identities-with those of network and behavior change, we investigated network characteristics of health lifestyles and the role of influence and selection processes underlying these characteristics. We examined these questions in two high schools using longitudinal, complete friendship network data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Latent class analyses characterized each school's predominant health lifestyles using several health behavior domains. School-specific stochastic actor-based models evaluated the bidirectional relationship between friendship networks and health lifestyles. Predominant lifestyles remained stable within schools over time, even as individuals transitioned between lifestyles. Friends displayed greater similarity in health lifestyles than nonfriend dyads. Similarities resulted primarily from teens' selection of friends with similar lifestyles but also from teens influencing their peers' lifestyles. This study demonstrates the salience of health lifestyles for adolescent development and friendship networks.
Since the early 2000s, foster care caseloads have decreased in many wealthy democracies, yet the causes of these declines remain, for the most part, a mystery. This article uses administrative data on all Danish municipalities (N = 277) and a 10% randomly drawn sample of all Danish children (N = 157,938) in the period from 1998 to 2010 to show that increasing medical treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) accounts for a substantial share of the decrease in foster care caseloads. According to our estimates, the decline in foster care caseloads during this period would have been 45% smaller absent increases in medical treatment of ADHD. These findings are especially provocative in light of recent research showing ambiguous effects of medical treatment of ADHD. Future research should be attentive to how medical treatment aimed at addressing children's acute behavioral problems could also have a powerful effect on foster care caseloads.