Facilitating population health and well-being requires organizations and individuals to share information and strategies across systems. Local public health agencies, healthcare providers, and their multi-sectoral partners often lead the way in testing and implementing evidence-based health messages, programs, and practices, sometimes partnering with academic researchers to become hubs for information-sharing among both public and private stakeholders. However, these organizations themselves exist within complex and varied communication networks that incorporate different systems and sectors. The resulting network heterogeneity has important implications for the reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance of evidence-based projects and programs, but little is known about the composition of these communication networks or how different network constellations drive information dissemination and program implementation activities.

This study seeks to address this gap by deploying social network and latent class analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Public Health Systems (NALSYS) to better understand and classify multi-sectoral, multi-organizational health communication networks. Findings will provide important insights for leveraging existing networks to enhance uptake of evidence-based information and practice.

Principal Investigators

Anna G. Hoover, PhD, MA
Assistant Professor
Department of Preventive Medicine and Environmental Health
University of Kentucky College of Public Health

Dominique Zephyr, MA
Statistician
University of Kentucky College of Public Health

Project Details

Year: 2018
Status: Inactive