Alumni engagement and philanthropy



HEALTH BENEFITS OF SOCIAL NETWORK INTERVENTIONS  

05 September 2019

Researchers from Queen’s has found that social network interventions, such as Facebook posts and sponsored ads, which educate popular teenagers to spread health messages to peer groups, can have a positive effect on public health behaviours and outcomes.

Dr Ruth Hunter, from the Centre for Public Health at Queen’s and the lead author on the paper, explained: “Humans are embedded in social networks and these networks obey very particular rules – mathematical, biological, sociological, and psychological. If we can understand these rules they give us whole new ways of intervening for the better.

“The aim of our research was to understand how best we can use social networks to encourage us to be healthier.”

Findings showed a significant effect of social network interventions for a range of health behaviours and outcomes, in particular for sexual health outcomes, both in the short and longer term.

Other positive behaviours noted were reaching out to pharmacists to quit smoking and/or cutting back on unhealthy foods.

Physical activity, diabetes and vaccinations were also positively benefitted by these interventions and led to significant improvements in health outcomes.

The research is published this week (3 September 2019) in PLOS Medicine and was funded by the Northern Ireland Research and Development Office.

In the study, the research team conducted a review and analysis of 37 studies.  The studies were conducted between the years 1996 and 2018, in 11 countries, and included a total of 53,891 participants.

Dr Hunter’s research interests are in physical activity and public health, particularly regarding the development and evaluation of complex interventions for behaviour change at the individual, community and population level. This also includes investigating the role of social networks, incentives (both financial and non-financial) and the built environment for physical activity behaviour change.

She was recently awarded a NIHR Career Development Fellowship to investigate the role of social network enabled interventions for physical activity behaviour change in conjunction with the University of Southern California, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.

Dr Janice Bailie, Assistant Director of the Public Health Agency’s (PHA) Research and Development Division, said: “This is important research which will have relevance for the development of health policy in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

“The National Institute for Health Research Fellowship Programme supports individuals on their trajectory to becoming future leaders in health and social care research.

“The Health and Social Care Research and Development Division of the PHA supports applications from Northern Ireland-based researchers to these award schemes, facilitating work such as that published by Dr Hunter and her research team.”

The implications of the investigation suggest that researchers and public health practitioners should consider how to use the social networks of their populations when delivering health behaviour interventions in order to maximise effectiveness.

In particular, the report recommends that the scientific community should move beyond individual-level approaches to design and test interventions that use the largely untapped potential of social networks to improve health behaviours and outcomes.

Media enquiries to comms.officer@qub.ac.uk or telephone: +44 (0)28 9097 5292.

Headline image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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