Peer influence in adolescent drinking behaviour: a protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis of stochastic actor-based modeling studies

Introduction Alcohol consumption is a considerable public health problem that is especially harmful to young people. To develop effective prevention programmes targeted at adolescents, it is important to understand the social mechanisms triggering alcohol consumption. Among such mechanisms, peer influence plays an important role. The effects of peer influence are very difficult to evaluate because of the entanglement with social selection, that is, a tendency of people to befriend others with similar behaviour. The recently developed stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOM) approach is designed to disentangle social influence from social selection. The aim of this study is to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies employing SAOM methodology to evaluate the effects of social influence on adolescent drinking behaviour. Methods and analysis In order to analyse the co-evolution of alcohol consumption and adolescent friendship networks, we will collect articles that use SAOM methodology through systematic electronic searches in Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, The Cochrane Library (Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials), EBSCOhost (MEDLINE, SocINDEX, Academic Source, ERIC), ProQuest (ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global), PsycINFO (PsycNET), Excerpta Medica database (Embase) and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL). We will collect the literature from academic journals, dissertations/theses, reports and conference materials. Three reviewers will retrieve and independently assess potentially relevant material in terms of whether they comply with prespecified criteria. Subsequently, we will summarise the results of the studies in a systematic review. If a sufficient number of studies can be found, SAOM quantitative results will be extracted and meta-analysed. The project will go from 1 December 2018 to 1 December 2019. Ethics and dissemination Ethical approval will not be required as our work is based on published studies. A list of all the studies included in this work will be available for review. We plan dissemination in a peer-reviewed international scientific journal and through conference presentations. Our review will highlight the peer effect of peers in adolescent drinking behaviour and provide guidance for developing effective prevention and intervention programmes. We expect it to be informative for policy and practice, decision-making as well as for further research in public health and sociology of adolescents.