Diffusion of Innovation: Female Condoms in South Africa
Amid all of the news and political activism surrounding the 2012 election, one article in the New York Times the other day stood out. This article, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/health/unlikely-model-for-hiv-prevention-porn-industry.html?ref=health , discussed pending legislation in the works in California to require pornographic actors to use condoms at all times when having sex. This change in sexual normalcy is motivated by government intervention, and not through a cascade in a network. However, some sexual practices, such as the adaptation of the female condom, do come about this way.
The female condom is a relatively new form of contraception, and as a result, its adoption into sexual practice has faced challenges. Many world health-conscious entities have been pushing this new technology into usage in developing countries, especially in Africa. The source that I used (http://www.supportworldwide.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Changing-perceptions-of-the-female-condom-in-South-Africa.pdf) is a report from the Support Organization, which seeks to build reproductive health programs across the world. This report specifically discusses the changing societal perspectives surrounding female condoms as a form of contraception and disease prevention in South Africa, which has one of the highest populations infected with HIV.
This is a real-world application of the diffusion of innovation, which is an important construct related to cascading behavior in networks. With the female condom, there are both informational and direct-benefit effects from using this form of contraception. If every woman is using this product, then their partners will expect that it is to be used whenever they have sex with other women. Here there is a direct benefit effect because the actions of other women directly determine the payoff, because they are creating a social norm of using this technology, which you have violated. The informational effect comes from the information obtained from others, which indirectly determines the payoff for someone else. For example, hearing that it prevented someone from getting HIV, or seeing commercials for it would make one think that using it would have a higher payoff than not using it.
At the advent of the introduction of this new technology to the South African network, the majority of the network, when mapped out, would appear to be a cluster, which the cascade would not reach. The report listed above indicated that there was a period when it seemed as though the female condom was not being used by South African women, in which there actually was a cluster, which prevented this new technology from cascading across the network. As a response, several changes to the distribution of the product were initialized. Specifically, they integrated both male and female condom distribution centers, increased education and training systems, and made the public more aware of their benefits. By doing this, the organizations responsible effectively made it so that the threshold for the remaining nodes in the cluster to adopt the female condom decreased, which then caused the diffusion of innovation from the initial adopters of the behavior to cascade throughout South African culture. Although there are still clusters that remain in this network, this resulted in the more widespread use of the female condom, and its acceptance as a sexual norm among South Africans.
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