Presented at ACBS World Conference 12, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2014
While opinion leader and other peer-based interventions that leverage the social context are firmly established in public health research contexts where we seek to impact individuals’ behaviors, recent developments in network analytic methods have led to substantial changes in the way we understand peer influence and selection processes and thus in the way we conceive of applying network studies to develop interventions that target health-related attitudes and behaviors. In this talk, I will present my framework for understanding network-based interventions and describe how that framework has evolved in light of new network statistical approaches. I will illustrate this evolutionary process with examples of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies that link individual behaviors and attitudes to network structure and composition. I will also discuss the relationship of social contextual factors on social networks, exploring how childhood abuse, substance use, and intimate partner violence shape the networks of homeless women, and how time homeless affects men’s social networks. I conclude with some discussion of future directions in research and application.
Keywords: Disease, prevention, health