Online Program

Modeling Social Networks as Mediators (306591)

Keywords: social networks, bayesian, mixed membership,

There are some public health interventions aimed at changing the ways in which individuals interact, and social networks are particularly useful for quantifying these changes. For many of these interventions, the ultimate goal is to change some outcome of interest such as individual behavior or opinion and social networks act as a natural mediator; an intervention changes the social networks of the individuals, and individuals with certain types of social networks tend to have certain behaviors, for example. Due to lack of methodology, however, social networks have not been modeled as mediators. We present a new framework for modeling social networks as mediators in which a social network model is embedded into a mediation model and both models are estimated simultaneously. As a proof of concept, we introduce a new network model for mediation, applicable for interventions that affect subgroup structure.