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Strengthening Prevention Program Theories and Evaluations: Contributions from Social Network Analysis

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Abstract

A majority of school-based prevention programs target the modification of setting-level social dynamics, either explicitly (e.g., by changing schools’ organizational, cultural or instructional systems that influence children’s relationships), or implicitly (e.g., by altering behavioral norms designed to influence children’s social affiliations and interactions). Yet, in outcome analyses of these programs, the rich and complicated set of peer network dynamics is often reduced to an aggregation of individual characteristics or assessed with methods that do not account for the interdependencies of network data. In this paper, we present concepts and analytic methods from the field of social network analysis and illustrate their great value to prevention science—both as a source of tools for refining program theories and as methods that enable more sophisticated and focused tests of intervention effects. An additional goal is to inform discussions of the broader implications of social network analysis for public health efforts.

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Notes

  1. In the sociological literature, social integration refers to the degree to which minority groups are integrated into the mainstream, but here we use the term more broadly to refer to the connectedness of a group of individuals without regard to their minority group status.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Scott D. Gest, D. Wayne Osgood, Mark E. Feinberg & Karen L. Bierman

  2. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    James Moody

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  1. Scott D. Gest
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  2. D. Wayne Osgood
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  3. Mark E. Feinberg
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  4. Karen L. Bierman
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  5. James Moody
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Correspondence to Scott D. Gest.

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Support for this research was provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (RO1-DA018225) and the William T. Grant Foundation (8316). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of any of the funding sources.

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Gest, S.D., Osgood, D.W., Feinberg, M.E. et al. Strengthening Prevention Program Theories and Evaluations: Contributions from Social Network Analysis. Prev Sci 12, 349–360 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-011-0229-2

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