The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and CDC's Syndemics Prevention Network present Spring 2007 symposia series on Systems Science and Health

The second symposium of the four-part series is:

Network Analysis: Using Connections and Structures to Understand and Change Health Behaviors

Katherine Faust, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Thomas Valente, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Preventive Medicine
University of Southern California

Dr. Faust will present a non-technical overview of methods used to analyze networks, with an emphasis on social networks. Topics include: formal representations of social networks (graphs and sociomatrices), social network data considerations, and methods for analyzing social networks (connectivity, centrality, cohesive subgroups, equivalences and blockmodels, subgraphs, and structural hypotheses).

Dr. Valente will describe methods for using network analysis to elucidate the antecedents and consequences of health-related behaviors. To do this, he will draw from a number of examples of his applied work in the areas of substance abuse prevention and treatment, contraceptive choices, and community coalitions among others. He will also describe how applied research utilizing network analysis methods can be used to stimulate improvement in individual, community and organizational behavior change programs. Prior experience with or exposure to network methods is not assumed.

This series is sponsored by the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and CDC’S Syndemics Prevention Network with support from the following NIH components: Division of Nutrition Research Coordination, Fogarty International Center, National Institute for Childhood Health and Human Development, National Institute for General Medical Sciences, and the National Cancer Institute.

A series of four educational seminars featuring leaders in various areas of systems science. The purposes are to raise awareness of particularly promising methodologies; and improve our collective understanding about how and when they may be used effectively by behavioral and social scientists (including researchers, policy analysts, planners/evaluators, grant reviewers, journal editors and government officials).