کد مقاله | کد نشریه | سال انتشار | مقاله انگلیسی | نسخه تمام متن |
---|---|---|---|---|
1129398 | 1488857 | 2015 | 10 صفحه PDF | دانلود رایگان |
• We propose a network-based method for monitoring health behavior.
• Examination of peer reporting helps to identify the characteristics of good informants.
• Peer reports can be used to triangulate self-reports.
• Smokers, optimistic students, and popular students make better informants than others.
• Using three to four positive peer reports can reasonably correct under-reported smoking.
We propose a network-based method to monitor health behaviors and point out the general conditions for it to work effectively. The method helps to identify effective informants for monitoring future health behaviors and to triangulate self-reports of sensitive health behaviors. We demonstrate the method by studying the smoking behaviors of over 4000 middle school students in China. Using students’ observations of their schoolmates smoking in the past 30 days, we construct smoking detection networks and examine the patterns of smoking detection. We find that smokers, optimistic students, and popular students make better informants than their counterparts. We also find that using three to four (or the 3rd quartile of) positive peer reports can uncover a good number of under-reported smokers while not producing excessive false positives.
Journal: Social Networks - Volume 42, July 2015, Pages 8–17