Better together ? Gender relationships and adolescents' risky behaviors

Grard, Adeline [UCL]

The objective of this Phd thesis is to investigate, via gender socialization theories, how gender socialization shapes adolescents’ behaviors and beliefs toward risky behaviors. In Chapter 1, we will describe gender gaps in smoking, binge drinking, cannabis use and school performances. We will show that these gender gaps are narrowing with time, a trend that coincide with gender mixing at school. Complementarily, in Chapter 2, we will investigate gender socialization processes and, in particular, how gender socialization promotes risky behaviors among young men. Building on these two ideas, we will try to answer this question, in Chapters 6 and 7: “Do relationships with the other gender influence adolescents toward risky behaviors?” We will indeed make the hypothesis that girls befriending with boys are more likely to be influenced by their male friends’ gender-situated norm of risky behavior. A hypothesis that our results will confirm. This would lead girls to display more risky behaviors, which would explain the reduction in the gender gap between boys’ and girls’ substance use. After having considered gender mixing in a peer-to peer perspective, we will take a step back and consider how the proportion of each gender in a school (the gender balance) may influence individual risky behavior. We will indeed show that girls in male-majority schools display more risky behaviors than girls in other types of school settings. In chapter 3, we will consider the literature on the determinants of a behavior adoption, and in particular, the beliefs about this behavior. Adolescents might indeed start smoking because they believe that smoking would bring benefits in their life. Yet, so far, no study has investigated whether genders differ in their smoking beliefs, a question that we will address in Chapter 8. We will show that there are few gender differences in smoking beliefs, which might explain the reducing gap in smoking across genders. Yet, if belief are so important in the adoption of a behavior, one should not forget to consider the people who make these beliefs arise in an individual. In Chapter 3, we will see the important theoretical role of the prototype, which are people that one individual considers as both likable and similar to him/her. To study this question in the context of adolescent smoking, we will dedicate Chapter 9 to the answer of this question: “Do closer/best friend have more influence on belief sharing in an individual than less closer friends? And as friendship dynamics differ across gender, Does this influential power of friends differ between boys and girls?”. This chapter will underline that smoking beliefs tend to be shared in close best friends peer groups, and that girls tend to share more beliefs with their friends, compare to boys. Then, in Chapter 10, we will first acknowledge than traditional explanation of women smoking does not fit with adolescent reality, and will postulate, along with the Silne R project, that genders differ in their response to School Tobacco Policies, which might explain the reduction in the gender gap of smoking among adolescents. This chapter will show that young boys tend to be more influenced by school tobacco policies than girls, but that the mechanisms explaining a reduction in smoking play for both genders. We will also show that traditional sanction of smoking has actually no influence on adolescent smoking behavior. To answer these questions, we will use data from the Silne R project, and will use social network analysis and measurement to help us measure friendship and friendship relationships. A complete description of the Silne R project and of our method and measurements is provided in Chapter 5.