Project 170960

Humans are social, and our social interactions have a strong effect on our behavior and how we respond to change. Over the last hundred years, ways of drawing and analyzing social networks have been developed. Along with the development of better and easier ways to understand human social networks, we have also developed a better understanding over the last three decades of how hard it can be to help people change behavior. We are beginning to develop specific interventions, or ways to make change easier, and to understand why some interventions work in some places with some people, and not others. This research has immediate impact on the health and wellbeing of the public in health care settings, where we would like to speed up how quickly health care providers adopt new research-based treatments. In particular, we have done relatively little research on how to bring research-based practice into long term or continuing care facilities, settings where mostly frail older people receive ongoing care, such as nursing homes. In this project, we will use relatively new methods of studying social networks among care providers in nursing homes, which we will add to an existing project. In the existing project, we are providing feedback reports based on data that are already being collected routinely on all residents. Feedback reports are being distributed every month, and we will ask additional questions and observe how people react when they get the feedback reports. We would like to understand how social networks--who talks to whom, who goes to another person to get advice--influence whether or not the feedback reports are used. The information from this project will be of great value in future research to develop efficient and effective interventions to promote practice based on research, and it will also help us understand how and why interventions work in some settings with some people, but not with others.

using social network analysis to study knowledge translation in long-term care settings