Abstract
Social capital, as comprised of human connections in social networks and their associated benefits, is closely related to the health of individuals, communities, and societies at large. For disadvantaged population groups such as older adults and racial/ethnic minorities, social capital may play a particularly critical role in mitigating the negative effects and reinforcing the positive effects on health. In this project, we model social capital as both cause and effect by simulating dynamic networks. Informed in part by a community-based health promotion program, an agent-based model is contextualized in a GIS environment to explore the complexity of social disparities in oral and general health as experienced at the individual, interpersonal, and community scales. This study provides the foundation for future work investigating how health and healthcare accessibility may be influenced by social networks.
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Acknowledgements
Work on this study was supported by NIH (NIDCR/OBSSR) R01 award DE023072, “Integrating Social and Systems Science Approaches to Promote Oral Health Equity.”
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Wang, H. et al. (2016). Modeling Social Capital as Dynamic Networks to Promote Access to Oral Healthcare. In: Xu, K., Reitter, D., Lee, D., Osgood, N. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9708. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39931-7_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39931-7_12
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