In France, if you want to build a home above a certain size, you’re legally required to use a licensed architect.

Can you guess what that size is

Leveraging Men’s Social Networks to Improve Health Engagement in Rural and Coastal Communities at University of Lincoln on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Leveraging Men’s Social Networks to Improve Health Engagement in Rural and Coastal Communities at University of Lincoln, listed on FindAPhD.com

We have a UK-funded PhD opportunity to study how men in rural England can improve healthcare access for their social connections. Tight deadline, truly mixed-methods supervisory team at University of Lincoln. Ask me or Paul Mee for details

Since neither axis is time the lines (which represent linear time) can double back if the % of grads drops over time (eg if lower educated immigrants outstrip new grads)

Will your favourite open source software tools soon be closed off? Freely available software relies on credit. AI is destroying that.

New post, on how AI is coming for open source software: kucharski.substack.com/p/will-your-...

Global Mental Health MSc YouTube video by UCLGlobalHealth

Do you want to learn about global mental health? At @uclglobalhealth.bsky.social in London? With global experts like @thewrittenro.bsky.social and Kelly Rose-Clarke?

Here's a 2 minute video about our brand new one-year MSc, do reach out to Rochelle or Kelly learn more!

#globalhealth #mentalhealth

Design of egocentric network-based studies to estimate causal effects under interference Many public health interventions are conducted in settings where individuals are connected to one another and the intervention assigned to randomly selected individuals may spill over to other individ...

The detailed stats are, as noted, above my paygrade. But great to see there are methods specific to network studies that give us some great estimands at low marginal cost. Exciting times!

And since the journal article is paywalled, here's the arXiv version

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

I was lucky to chat with Laura Forastiere @yalesph.bsky.social recently - a v nerdy discussion of networks & interventions - and stats that are well above my paygrade

Which sent me off to read her latest methods paper on how to estimate causal effects in cRCTs using egonet contacts as controls

Also, maybe consider modelling network dependencies using ALAAMs or similar.

(I know, I only have one tune these days, but its a cool option when you have true sociocentric data)

For me this begs for longitudinal +/- qual data to see unpack whether this is homphily (knowledgeable people are friends) or influence (friends teaching friends). Or even if nurses at clinics are teaching friends jointly?

So hopefully lots more work to come!

Just read this new paper from Alison Comfort et al, incl @drdrtsai.bsky.social as senior author. Great evidence of clustering of knowlege (about getting your baby tested for HIV if you are living with HIV) on networks!

Authors suggest this reversal may be driven by e.g. women who have been attacked by their husbands (who have pro-IPVAW attitudes) then reacting to be more negative

Another great use of ALAAM modelling to unpack social clustering/influence/contagion in a principled way!

Gender-biased clustering of attitudes towards physical intimate partner violence: A social network analysis in south-central Ethiopia Abstract. Changing social norms, shared beliefs about what is acceptable, is a key focus of global health campaigns aimed at ending intimate partner violen

Another great paper using social network data from >5000 Ethiopians by @drsarahmyers.bsky.social, @danielredhead.bsky.social et al.

They show how attitudes towards IPV against women cluster socially on gender-homphilous ties. But opposite-gender ties actually predict *reverse* IPVAW attitudes
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The vaccine paper was led by Steven Wilson at University of South Florida - I don't immediately see the authors on here.

And sadly it is behind a paywall, so far as I can tell.

Normative Rhetorical Theory A detailed statement of the model can be found in my 2004 book, Communicating Social Support (Cambridge). I apply the model in my research on Heart-healthy Lifestyle Changes and Couple Communicatio…

The paper uses Daena Goldsmith's Normative Rhetorical Theory (new to me), with its focus on how your words are interpretted by those hearing them, and how this interpretation is filtered through the tasks, identities and relationships involved (this is my first very surface read of the theory)

4 key dilemmas raised by respondents:
(a) I want to use facts, but they don’t trust the facts
(b) I want to respect but challenge their views
(c) I want to push hard enough without pushing too hard
(d) I want to respect their right to choose while guiding them to the “right” choice

Difficult Health Conversations: Dilemmas That Vaccinated People in the United States Experienced When Discussing COVID-19 Vaccination with Hesitant Family Members During the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, public health officials in the United States called upon vaccinated individuals to encourage reluctant family members to get vaccinated. Due in part to the ...

How do people negotiate discussions around vaccines with close contacts, as reported by 100 US residents around Covid

Respondents suggest ways of handling complex conversations:
- Reframing diffs of opinion as caring
- Focusing on personal experince not science
- Build from shared moral viewpoints

A poster reading “I kissed a koala and I like it”

Excellent marketing for this Kiss the Koala cafe. Terrible public health messaging

A handy translation guide for non-academic speakers.

We think this was due to some combination of:

1) insufficient training of interviewers (squarely on me)
2) non-comprehension of reverse-coded questions (low education attainment)
3) non-transferability of scale items to these communities

The scales from elsewhere did not cohere in a very poor rural setting. Respondents appeared not to 'get' the prompts leading to terrible internal validity and test-retest reliability

Validating the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Reporting in a low literacy adolescent population in Burkina Faso - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Validating the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Reporting in a low literacy adolescent population in Burkina Faso

Second, work led by (then medical student) Karolin Kirchgaesser. We evaluated if the BIDR scale developed in high-income settings could identify which Burkinabe adolescents are more likely to (intentionally or unintentionally) mis-report in favour of socially desirable answers

Reader, we can not

Reducing response bias in reports of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder: An application of the nonverbal response card in a survey of youth in Burkina Faso Response bias for sensitive questions in face-to-face interviewer-administered surveys is a common problem. Our objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of the nonverbal response card (NVRC) in so....

First up, with David Lindstrom @brownsociology.bsky.social we show that using non-verbal response cards (so interviewers don't know what answer respondents give), increases reporting of sensitive experiences. In this case #trauma & #ptsd in rural Burkinabe teens

Msg: Privacy in interviews matters

🚨 New methods papers 🚨

I'm delighted to report we have two papers out this week that try and improve how we collect and analyse survey data

Colleagues are probably bored of me saying it, but an interview is a dyadic process & we should always consider the effect of both parties & their interaction

On Tuesday, we hosted Jane Greve (VIVE – Danish Centre for Social Science Research) for a fascinating seminar on “Family Spillovers of Dementia.” Using 20 years of Danish register data, she explored how parental dementia affects adult children’s lives.

This is all part of our wider mixed-methods investigation of rural informal caregiving:

In-depth ethnography highlighted that our surveys - one part of a wider quantitative questionnaire, one during the ethnographic process - missed key aspects of health limitations. Esp about functional limitations vs diagnosed disease

Tl; dr We needed to do better scoping these survey questions

Variation in Health Status Reports: Triangulating Mixed Methods Data to Assess the Health and Wellbeing of Primary Caregivers to Older Rural South Africans - Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology Caregivers’ health status is important, given its importance for their own wellbeing and capacity to provide quality care. While single item self-rated health questions in surveys are an efficient mea...

🚨 New paper 🚨

We have a lovely mixed-methods paper highlighting how method of data collection *strongly* affects what you find

In the context of informal caregiving for older persons in rural South Africa

Work led by Michelle Brear and Lenore Manderson

Network Interventions | Engaging Social Networks to Accelerate Diffusi Social networks are important sources of influence on many personal, organizational, community, and societal behaviors. Network interventions (NIs) are

For anyone interested in social networks and interventions, this new book (out at the end of Nov) by Tom Valente is self-recommending and likely to be the bible for some time to come

#networks #interventions #socialnetworks

The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute Objectives To determine the overall rate of loss of workplace teaspoons and whether attrition and displacement are correlated with the relative value of the teaspoons or type of tearoom. Design Longi...

Was this a follow-up study from:

Interesting (pre-print) protocol for a study @bristoluni.bsky.social @einsteinmededu.bsky.social & Kenya MOH & AIDS/STI Control Programmestudy to link behaviour & phylogenetics around blood-borne & sexually transmitted infections in Kenya. With the plan of modelling interventions to reduce BBI