You Are Who You Know – Social Networks and Public Health
Jun 15th, 2011 by BK
Your life is shaped by your friends, your friends’ friends, and their friends. That is what Dr. Nicolas Christakis told an audience last night in Vancouver.
Dr. Christakis is a professor from Harvard with backgrounds in medicine and sociology who conducts research on social networks. Don’t just think Facebook or Twitter. Social networks are so much more. They include traditional face-to-face relationships and any other form of relationship.
Dr. Christakis has found clusters of social networks for phenomena such as obesity and depression. If you are obese, your friends (and their friends) are more likely to be obese as well. On the other hand, he has also found clusters of social networks for something more upbeat – happiness. If you are happy, your friends (and their friends) are more likely to be happy as well.
So are we entirely shaped by who we know? The answer is no. We can actually influence those around us as well. So what does this mean for public health?
Dr. Christakis believes that a social network approach can be used to design public health interventions. This means finding the people at the centre of extensive social clusters, and aiming to improve health for these people as well as their friends, their friends’ friends and so on.
In the past, public health interventions have used peer support to help individuals maintain improvements to health. However, these peers tend to be seen as support rather than being part of the target population. Under a social network approach, peers would be improving their own health as well. It would be like a buddy system, but not just one-on-one. For example, a group of 11 friends who all know each other could improve health together. However, it doesn’t stop there. Their friends and their friends’ friends could be involved as well.
The challenge for public health is how to identify who is at the centre of social clusters. These data are not traditionally collected in the field of public health. One way is to work with social network researchers to design interventions that tap into existing data. If there is money, perhaps new data could be collected on previously unexplored populations.
But all this is relatively new, so some pilot projects would provide useful lessons on designing public health interventions using a social network approach, as well as evaluating the effectiveness of these interventions.
Interest in harnessing social networks continues to increase. The private sector and commercial marketers have certainly been harnessing social networks with some successes and of course some lessons learned. Perhaps it’s time for the public health sector to jump on the bandwagon.
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