The Role of Social Networks in Health
At the start of the semester, we discussed how networks mediate the flow of information and access to opportunities in social contexts. The main example brought up in class was job opportunities. Someone from a different friend group than yours may know about other job opportunities than your friend group. Also, someone that is in a larger social network will have access to even more opportunities and information. I think another important example to bring up is the role of social networks in health. Especially following the HIV epidemic, researchers became aware of how infectious diseases and even behaviors such as smoking can spread within social networks. Health advocates and medical researchers now use these social networks to conduct health interventions to prevent or encourage the spread of certain behaviors (Chapman, et al., 2022). A research article published earlier this year looked at the role of social networks in facilitating health care access among low-income women in the Philipines.
This study interviewed 35 women in addition to 15 health care providers. The participants said that their main source of health information was people from their social networks. Their social network did not just include family, but also friends, neighbors, community leaders, and community health workers; this was especially true for older women. Older women in the study tended to have a larger and stronger social network they feel they could reach out to. In order for health community health workers or health care providers to be able to spread information, trust needs to be established. Efficiency and their satisfaction with the care they receive also play a role in this. This suggests trust influences the strength of the ties between the women and the workers, which needs to be strong for the women to trust the information they receive and to seek out health care facilities over local healers. Triadic closure may play a role in this. If someone else in their social network, such as a family member, is satisfied with the care they received, a person is more likely to seek out a particular healthcare service.
Also, low-income women face a lot of barriers to receiving health care services, such as transportation and cost. Women were often able to ask for and receive financial support, food, childcare support, etc. from their social networks. Older women even used connections with local politicians to subsidize healthcare costs.
Thus, this study shows how social networks can be a very important tool to spread health information or receive some type of support that can improve its members’ health. This study also shows the importance of health care workers establishing strong ties with the local community in order to best spread salient health information.
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