RWS305W What is Academic Writing in My Major Discipline Writing Project 4 -READ THE PROMPT and MEET ALL REQUIREMENTS -Use the scholarly article I provided

RWS305W What is Academic Writing in My Major Discipline Writing Project 4 -READ THE PROMPT and MEET ALL REQUIREMENTS

-Use the scholarly article I provided for this writing project.

-Make this paper a solid analysis of ethos.

-Meet MLA standards for format, style, citation, and documentation.

-Writing should be 5 pages

-Please have it in 12pt font,

-In the prompt file I provided, follow every step in the Criteria for Evaluation section RWS 305W, Writing Project 4:
Academic Writing in My Major/Discipline
Introduction:
At some point in your academic career, particularly as you complete upper division coursework in your selected
major, you will be expected to work with scholarship produced by professionals in your field. Some of you are
probably thinking, “I’m nursing” or “I just started my hospitality and tourism management courses” or “I’m an
electrical engineering major,” and such thoughts are likely followed by “and people in my major don’t write for
academic audiences.” Behold, aspiring nursing, HTM, and electrical engineering majors: professionals in your
field contribute to the Journal of Transcultural Nursing, the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research, and
the Scientific Journal of Electrical Engineering, respectively.
To be perfectly honest, one fallacy college students embrace – because they are somehow “taught” this – is the
idea that when we graduate, we never need to write again for an academic audience. Indeed, advancement in
many disciplines requires professionals to read, research, and write—and to do these things frequently!
Project 4 is designed to achieve two broad objectives. First, this assignment is intended to introduce students to
scholarship produced by professionals in their given discipline or major. Second, this assignment is designed to
help students approach such writing by utilizing the concepts addressed in this rhetoric and writing studies
course.
Prompt:
Commence your work by locating a text published in a peer reviewed or professional periodical associated with
your major, discipline, or specialization. The text you select will need to have been published in a credible
periodical within the past three years (so, nothing before 2016, please). And, the text should be a minimum of
ten pages in length (including Works Cited/References, Bibliography). Please make sure your text meets these
requirements. A five-page “scholarly” article published in 2005 will not work, for instance.
Using this single text published in a professional and/or scholarly periodical associated with your discipline or
major, you are tasked with analyzing its author’s use of “conventions of academic writing” and strategies for
developing ethos. Identify multiple conventions used, examine why they were chosen, and analyze the effects
they have upon the author’s target audience. In addition, explore the relative success or failure of the author to
establish her/his/their credibility as speakers on the issue/topic addressed in the selected text.
Please include an appropriate introductory section, one that accomplishes similar moves to many articles
published in academic or professional periodicals. Furthermore, conclude your response by exploring some
aspect of “Why should others care?” in relation to this major writing assignment. To meet the various demands
of Project 3 successfully, a response of 5 MLA formatted pages is expected. Also, a Works Cited page is not
included in this total but is expected.
Criteria for Evaluation:
Successful papers will
1. Provide an introductory section that engages readers and introduces them to your selected text and
purpose of this assignment;
2. Identify and demonstrate the author’s use of different conventions, elements and strategies for
establishing ethos and explain whether the author is successful in establishing ethos;
3. Identify and analyze some of the different elements of academic writing used to develop the text;
4. Conclude the response appropriately by exploring the paper’s significance for others;
5. Use an effective structure that carefully guides the reader from one idea to the next, including the use of
transition phrases and sentences between ideas;
6. Be thoroughly edited and use appropriate diction and tone to satisfy an academic audience’s
expectations;
7. Meet MLA standards for format, style, citation, and documentation.
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Peer effects on adolescent smoking:
Are popular teens more influential?
Juan David Robalino1,2*, Michael Macy3
1 Department of Economics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States of America, 2 IZA – Institute for the
Study of Labor, Bonn, Germany, 3 Department of Information Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United
States of America
* jr872@cornell.edu
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OPEN ACCESS
Citation: Robalino JD, Macy M (2018) Peer effects
on adolescent smoking: Are popular teens more
influential? PLoS ONE 13(7): e0189360. https://doi.
org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189360
Editor: Yuyan Shi, University of California, San
Diego, UNITED STATES
Received: February 27, 2017
Accepted: November 27, 2017
Abstract
Previous research on adolescent cigarette adoption has focused on peer influence and the
perceived status gain from smoking but has ignored the status effects on peer influence. We
analyze adolescent peer effects on cigarette consumption while considering the popularity
of peers. The analysis is based on a four wave panel survey representative of American
high school students. We measure peers’ popularity by their eigenvector centrality in high
school social networks. Using lagged peers’ behavior, school fixed effects, and instrumental
variables to control for homophily and contextual confounds, we find that the probability of
smoking the following year increases with the mean popularity of smokers, while the popularity of non-smokers has the opposite effect. These effects persist seven and fourteen
years later (wave 3 and 4 of the data). In addition, the probability of smoking increases with
the smoking propensity of the 20% most popular teens and decreases with the smoking propensity of the bottom 80%. The results indicate the importance of knowing not only the
smoking propensity within a school but also the location of smokers within the social
hierarchy.
Published: July 12, 2018
Copyright: © 2018 Robalino, Macy. This is an open
access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author and source are credited.
Data Availability Statement: Data used in this
study contain sensitive participant information and
cannot be made publicly available. Restrictions on
the data have been imposed by the Carolina
Population Center. To apply for access to these
data, interested researchers may contact the
Carolina Population Center by email at
addhealth@unc.edu or at the following address:
Carolina Population Center University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB# 8120 206 West
Franklin Street Chapel Hill, NC 27516.
Funding: The authors received no specific funding
for this article.
Introduction
Identifying the drivers of smoking adoption among youth remains a public health priority. Initiating smoking at a young age is correlated with smoking more cigarettes per day and with a
lower probability of quitting later in life [1, 2]. More than 480,000 deaths are attributed to cigarette smoking every year in the US alone. At the current rate of adoption, 5.6 million Americans under 18 –about 1 of every 13– will die early from a smoking-related illness.
Previous research points to peer influence as an important cause of adolescent smoking
[3–9]. Adolescents are especially vulnerable to social influence as they try to fit in with their
peers [10, 11]. Numerous studies suggest that some smokers believe that smoking promotes
social status [12–15], and yet previous research has failed to test a key implication: that the propensity to smoke may increase with the popularity of smokers among peers. In other contexts,
peer influence has been found to increase with their social status [16], but no previous studies
have empirically tested the effects of the social status of adolescent smokers on the spread of
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Peer effects on adolescent smoking: Are popular teens more influential?
Competing interests: The authors have declared
that no competing interests exist.
smoking through peer networks. The need to empirically test this status-belief explanation is
the starting point for our study.
Previous research on popularity and smoking
Several studies have analyzed the link between popularity of adolescents (usually measured by
the number of incoming friendship nominations) and their smoking behavior. For example,
Valente et al. [12] and Ennett et al. [13] found a positive relationship between popularity and
smoking; Alexander et al. [14] found that popular students are more likely to smoke in schools
with high smoking rates, and less likely in schools with low smoking rates. Michell and Amos
[15] used qualitative data from Scottish schoolgirls and found that popular girls smoke to
maintain their image while some unpopular girls smoke with the hope of gaining social status,
but no effect in the mid-popularity range.
These studies indicate that smoking may be used as a strategy to climb the social ladder,
based on the belief that smoking will lead to an increase in social status. However, they do not
test the peer effects of smokers’ social status. To address this gap, we reverse the causal arrow:
instead of testing whether smoking affects status, we test how the popularity of smokers affects
their influence on the behavior of their peers. We posit that the relative popularity of smokers
and non-smokers will condition whether smoking will be associated with social status in that
population. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of the effect of smokers’ popularity on peer influence for smoking.
It is worth noting that there have been anti-smoking field interventions that relied implicitly on the hypothesis that we are testing. For example, to promote an anti-smoking campaign
in high schools, a field experiment explicitly recruited individuals nominated by fellow students as “influential” [17], and their intervention proved successful in comparison to the
smoking rates of the control high schools that did not recruit any students. In short, this
research assumed status differences in influence but did not test that assumption. Our study is
motivated by the need to empirically test an assumption that informs intervention strategies
not only into smoking but into other public health, advertising, and electoral campaigns.
The reflection problem
Like most previous studies of peer influence on adolescent smoking, we rely on observational
data. Seminal work by Manski [18] identifies the inherent difficulty in estimating peer effects
with observational data, which he refers to as the reflection problem. According to Manski, a
correlation between the average behavior of the group and an individual’s behavior can be
attributed to three possible mechanisms:
• endogenous effects, where an individual’s choice is influenced by the choices of the group, as
occurs with peer effects on behavior;
• exogenous (contextual) effects, where individuals in a given group may behave similarly
because the whole group has experienced an (unobserved) exogenous shock;
• correlated effects, where individuals in a group behave similarly because they have similar
unobservable characteristics and self-select into the group.
The challenge with observational data is how to disentangle endogenous effects from contextual and correlated effects. Several identification approaches have been used. Sacerdote [19]
studied peer effects on the Grade Point Average (GPA) of college students using exogenous
group formation from random allocation to college dorms in order to control for peers’ self-
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Peer effects on adolescent smoking: Are popular teens more influential?
selection and homophily. He also used peers’ lagged GPA (from high-school) to control for
contextual confounds.
In the absence of random allocation of peers, several studies of peer effects on smoking
have used broad pseudo-exogenous peer groups, controls for school level fixed effects, as well
as instrumental variables for peers’ behavior. Lundborg [6] used the smoking rate among classmates as peer referents; Fletcher [3] used the school grade; Clark and Lohéac [9] used lagged
behavior at the grade level (i.e., the smoking rate during the previous year); Norton et al. [20],
Gaviria and Raphael [5] and Powell et al. [4] used the whole school. To account for contextual
cofounds, Gaviria and Raphael [5], and Powell et al. [4] controlled for cigarette prices and public policy variables, while Lundborg [6], Clark and Lohéac [9], and Fletcher [3] included school
fixed effects. Norton et al. [20], Gaviria and Raphael [5], Powell et al. [4], and Fletcher [3] also
instrumented the behavior of peers using household or neighborhood characteristics. All these
studies found strong evidence of peer influence on cigarettes use.
In line with previous studies, we use the lagged behavior of peers at the school grade level to
control for homophily and include school fixed effects to control for contextual confounds.
Nevertheless, the observed effects from multivariate models remain susceptible to unobserved
heterogeneity. We therefore also use instrumental variables to test the robustness of the causal
inferences.
Data and methods
The present study is based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent
Health (AddHealth), a four-wave panel (1995, 1996, 2002 and 2009) administered to a representative sample of American High Schools. This data set contains detailed information about
substance use as well as rich social network data with which to measure the popularity of students. The multi-wave longitudinal data also includes identifiers for grade, year, school, and
detailed measures of household and parents’ characteristics. The In-School survey conducted
in 1995 covered 90,118 adolescents in 144 schools. A representative sub-sample of 20,745 students also completed the 1995 In-Home wave 1 survey which included more detailed information such as family income and parents’ smoking habits. Finally, about 15,000 students were
surveyed again in 1996 (In-Home survey wave 2), as well as 2002 (In-Home wave 3) and 2009
(In-Home wave 4; see Fig 1). After excluding individuals with missing information and schools
with insufficient social network data, we have a sample of about 66,000 peers and a core sample
of about 7,500 individuals.
Fig 1. Data structure.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189360.g001
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Peer effects on adolescent smoking: Are popular teens more influential?
Popularity measure
AddHealth identifies peers by asking each respondent to name their five closest male friends
within the school and their five closest female friends in order of importance (i.e., best friend,
second best friend, etc). These nominations form the social network of the school and can
then be used to measure the popularity of each respondent by their eigenvector centrality. Intuitively, the popularity of individual i will be proportional to the popularity of peers who nominated i as a friend, hence being nominated by popular teens makes you more popular.
Formally, the centrality vi of individual i in school s is
vi ¼
1X
l j vj aji
where aij = 1/nij if individual i nominated individual j as his/her nth best friend and aij = 0 otherwise; or equivalently using vector notation we recover the eigenvector expression lv ¼ A0s v,
where As is the so called adjacency matrix of the social network in school s and λ is the largest
eigenvalue –in order to ensure that all the elements of v are positive as guaranteed by the
Perron–Frobenius theorem. This weighted-eigenvector centrality (i.e., weighted by the inverse
of the friendship nomination order) is preferred as it also takes account of the difference
between being the best friend of many people and being the fifth best friend of many people.
In the working paper [21] we obtain similar results using in-degree, out-degree, and Katz–
Bonacich centrality.
We compare the centrality measure across school/grades in two ways: by standardizing the
measure, and by classifying respondents into centrality quintiles for each grade level (from the
20% most popular to the 20% least popular).
Table 1 describes ‘popular’ teens by regressing centrality on respondent attributes. The
results show that popular teens tend to be older, white, from higher income households, well
Table 1. Correlates of popularity. Weighted standardized eigenvector centrality.
Smoke—Tried 1995
0.033
(0.028)
Black
-0.367
(0.046)
Candid (0/1)
0.003
(0.030)
Smoke—Everyday 1995
-0.022
(0.050)
Hispanic
-0.123
(0.045)
Attractive personality (0/1)
-0.018
(0.038)
Cigs. available at home
-0.044
(0.030)
Asian
0.014
(0.068)
Well groomed (0/1)
0.060
(0.032)
Male
-0.002
(0.031)
Other
-0.13
(0.162)
Physically attractive (0/1)
0.182
(0.037)
Age
0.298
(0.164)
Weekly earnings
-0.027
(0.018)
Physically mature (0/1)
0.118
(0.032)
Age sq.
-0.009
(0.005)
Overweight (0/1)
-0.151
(0.028)
Const.
-2.719
(1.390)
HH income
0.922
(0.346)
Sports 1-2 times/week
0.055
(0.033)
Degrees of freedom
Foreign
-0.096
(0.039)
Sports 3-4 times/week
0.094
(0.040)
R2
0.154
New student
-0.152
(0.033)
Sports 5+ times/week
0.198
(0.039)
N
7169
148
OLS regression. Standard errors clustered at the school level are shown in parenthesis.
Significance at the 10% level;

Significance at the 5% level;

Significance at the 1% level.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189360.t001
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Peer effects on adolescent smoking: Are popular teens more influential?
groomed, play sports and they tend to be physically mature and attractive. In contrast, un-popular teens tend to be black or hispanic, overweight, foreign, and new to the school.
Smoking measures
The items on smoking behavior differ slightly between the In-Home and In-School survey
instruments. For the In-Home survey, we consider as regular smokers those who smoked
everyday during the month prior to the interview. We also classify casual smokers as those
who tried at least one cigarette in the 30 days prior to the interview. More precisely, for each
wave we also measure the number of cigarettes consumed per month. In wave 4 (for which the
interview took place fourteen years after wave 1) we also code respondents having ever smoked
everyday for at least one month (thus, accounting for individuals who may have smoked only
between interviews); the age at which individuals tried their first cigarette; and the age at
which individuals started smoking everyday. The top panel of Table 2 summarizes these measures. In 1996, 32% of students tried cigarettes and 11% smoked everyday; by 2009, 21% were
regular smokers. Our estimation strategy assumes that the correlations between smoking in
1995 and in subsequent years are not so high as to introduce multicollinearity. In S1 Table in
the supporting information we present these correlations and the first column shows that
there is considerable variation between smoking in 1995 and subsequent years (ranging from
a correlation with smoking in 2009 of 0.3, to a correlation with “trying cigarettes in 1996”
of 0.53).
For peers in the In-School survey, we define as smokers those who reported smoking “once
or twice a week” to “daily”. We intentionally use a high threshold of consumption for peers
because we suspect that influence arises from regular users who may influence an (initially)
Table 2. Summary statistics.
Mean
SD
N
Smoking
Tried by 1995
0.25
0.43
7620
Tried 1996
0.32
0.47
7620
Everyday 1996
0…
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