• How can I turn these keypoints into an essay?
• Analyze the potential effect of social influences on health
  • Solid scientific evidence shows that social relationships affect a range of health outcomes, including mental health, physical health, health habits, and mortality risk.
  • The unique perspective and research methods of sociology provide a scientific platform to suggest how policy makers might improve population health by promoting and protecting social relationships (Cacioppo and Hawkley 2003).
  • Social relationshipsboth quantity and qualityaffect mental health, health behavior, physical health, and mortality risk.
  • Sociologists have played a central role in establishing the link between social relationships and health outcomes, identifying explanations for this link, and discovering social variation (e.g., by gender and race) at the population level. Studies show that social relationships have short- and long-term effects on health, for better and for worse, and that these effects emerge in childhood and cascade throughout life to foster cumulative advantage or disadvantage in health.
  • Over the past few decades, social scientists have gone beyond evidence of extreme social deprivation to demonstrate a clear link between social relationships and health in the general population. Adults who are more socially connected are healthier and live longer than their more isolated peers.
  • This article describes major findings in the study of social relationships and health, and how that knowledge might be translated into policy that promotes population health. Key research findings include: (1) social relationships have significant effects on health; (2) social relationships affect health through behavioral, psychosocial, and physiological pathways; (3) relationships have costs and benefits for health; (4) relationships shape health outcomes throughout the life course and have a cumulative impact on health over time; and (5) the costs and benefits of social relationships are not distributed equally in the population.
  • Studies on adolescents often point to the meaning attached to peer groups (e.g., what it takes to be popular) when explaining the influence of peers on alcohol, tobacco, and drug use (Crosnoe, Muller, and Frank 2004).
  • For example, stressful family interactions may have their greatest impact on children's health, while peer pressure and the social meaning of health habits (e.g., pressure to experiment with tobacco, alcohol, and drugs) may have their greatest impact in adolescent relationships, and social control of health habits may be most important in adult relationships.
  • Solid scientific evidence shows that social relationships affect a range of health outcomes, including mental health, physical health, health habits, and mortality risk. Sociologists have played a major role in establishing these linkages, in identifying explanations for the impact of social relationships on health, and in discovering social variation (e.g., by age and gender)
  • Studying adolescents' health risk behaviours is oddly significant in Central and Eastern European countries, where the prevalence of smoking and drinking among 14-18 year old students is significantly high. The goal of our study is to examine the role of social psychological and social behavioural variables in health risk behaviours among Hungarian adolescents.
  • According to our results (1) social behavioural factors (namely, smoking and alcohol use of the best friend and peer group) proved to be better predictors of adolescents' health risk behaviours as compared to the included social psychological attributes (2); among the latter ones, loneliness and shyness were negatively related with both smoking and drinking, while competitiveness was a predictor of drinking prevalence among boys.
  • The findings suggest that social behavioural factors, including smoking and drinking of friends, are oddly important predictors of Hungarian adolescents' health risk behaviours. According to our results, health policy should pay more attention to peer norms related to smoking and drinking during school health promotion. Developing health protective social norms may be an indispensable component of effective health promotion in high schools.