Understanding Health Behavior Using Social Network Analysis

Authors: Namrata Mishra

Abstract:

Health of a person plays a vital role in the collective health of his community and hence the well-being of the society as a whole. But, in today’s fast paced technology driven world, health issues are increasingly being associated with human behaviors – their lifestyle. Social networks have tremendous impact on the health behavior of individuals. Many researchers have used social network analysis to understand human behavior that implicates their social and economic environments. It would be interesting to use a similar analysis to understand human behaviors that have health implications. This paper focuses on concepts of those behavioural analyses that have health implications using social networks analysis and provides possible algorithmic approaches. The results of these approaches can be used by the governing authorities for rolling out health plans, benefits and take preventive measures, while the pharmaceutical companies can target specific markets, helping health insurance companies to better model their insurance plans.

Keywords: Health behaviors, social network analysis, directed graph, breadth first search.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1109289

References:

[1] Su, W. C. (2014, May). Integrating and mining virtual communities across multiple Online Social Networks: Concepts, approaches and challenges. In Digital Information and Communication Technology and it's Applications (DICTAP), 2014 Fourth International Conference on (pp. 199-204). IEEE.
[2] G. Cheliotis, "Social network analysis (SNA): including a tutorial on concepts and methods," National University of Singapore (Nov.1, 2012), 2010.
[3] Karen Glanz, Jay Maddock: Behavior, Health Related – Health Article, The Gale Group Inc., Macmillan Reference USA, New York, 2002.
[4] Thomas W. Valente, Ph.D.: Social networks can be used to influence health behavior: study: Medical Press, Science 2012.
[5] David Liben-Novell: An Algorithmic Approach to Social Networks. In: Department of EE and CS in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ,June 2005.
[6] Makism Tsvetovat, Alexandar Kouznetsov: Social Network Analysis for Start-ups, Publish by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
[7] Tianyi Wang, Yang Chen, Zengbin Zhang , Tianyin Xu, Long Jin, Pan Hui, Beixing Deng, Xing Li: Understanding Graph Sampling Algorithms for Social Network Analysis..
[8] Silvio Lattanzi: Algorithms and models for social networks: Sapienza, Università di Roma: Dottorato di Ricerca in Computer Science: XXIII Ciclo – 2010.
[9] Kirsten P. Smith, Nicholas A. Christakis: Social Networks and Health: Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008. 34:405–29.
[10] Li, Charlene, and Bernoff, Josh. “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies,” 2008.
[11] David, S Gochman: “Health Behavior: emerging research perspective”, Springer Science & Business Media Newyork, 1998.