Health Behaviors Influenced By Social Networking

(Ivanhoe Newswire) ““ Social networking is taking over our society today, so much so that scientists believe even health behaviors are being affected, too.

Researchers believe that living in a network with close contact with people a person knows well and trusts affects his/her health behaviors. Redundancy is the key to change, when a person hears about the same idea multiple times they seem to change their habits to try out this new idea, and we see this redundancy happening most within dense clusters of connections.

“For about 35 years, wisdom in the social sciences has been that the more long ties there are in a network, the faster a thing will spread,” Damon Centola, an assistant professor at the MIT School of Management was quoted as saying. “It’s starting to see that this is not always the case.”

To observe the differences social networks make Centola ran a series of experiments using na internet-based health community he developed. There were 1,528 people in the study and they all had anonymous profiles and a series of health interests. These people were then grouped with others who had similar health interests. The participants received e-mails about the activities their group was doing. The participants were stuck into two groups- those oriented around long ties and those oriented around dense communities, and ran six separate trials over about a six week period to see which group was more likely to register for an online health forum website offering rating of health resources.

The study revealed that 54 percent of the people in clustered networks registered for the health forum, while 38 percent from the long ties oriented group registered. Moreover, people were more likely to participate in the health forum if their buddies did it too. Only 15 percent of the participants returned to the forum when they had only one buddy registered, while 30 percent returned when they had 2 buddies.

Centola believes this could have implications for health officials, because the people may need to start getting reassurance to go to the doctor instead of just going when they’re supposed to. He also believes more research needs to be done examining the effects of online social networking.

SOURCE: Science, published online September 1, 2010