Research

Social Networks and Health

Our main effort at present is directed at understanding the structure and function of social networks and how this structure and function relate to health and health care.  By taking advantage of archival data from the Framingham Heart Study that we computerized in a novel way (and with the collaboration of our colleagues there, Joanne Murabito and Emelia Benjamin), we have developed a longitudinally resolved network of 12,000 people followed for 32 years (what we call the "FHS-Net").  We are using this data set to explore numerous topics, including the spread of health behaviors in the network (e.g., obesity, smoking, eating, health screening), the spread of other health-related phenomena in the network (e.g., depression, happiness, loneliness), the influence of health events (such as a heart attack or a stroke) in one person on the health of others to whom he or she is connected, the socio-biological determinants of network ties, and the role of egocentric reference groups in individuals’ health. We are also actively developing other data sets that allow further investigation of such topics, and we are investigating the genetic origins of certain social network properties. Much of this work has been done in close collaboration with my colleague, James Fowler, a political scientist at UCSD. Click here for published papers on these topics.

With respect to our work on the spread of obesity, we discovered that weight gain (and weight loss) appears to spread along social network ties, thus contributing to the rise in obesity seen in the US in the last 30 years. Click here for a three-minute video interview with Nicholas Christakis regarding this work. Click here for a copy of the paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. Click here for a narrated animation showing the spread of obesity in the network available at the New England Journal of Medicine. Click here to view and download the original animation. Click here for co-investigator James Fowler's website.  

Our past work in this area also focused on a very simple type of social network, namely, dyads of husbands and wives. This work investigated the health benefits of marriage, the widowhood effect, and caregiver burden. Click here for a list of published papers on health and marriage and here for papers on widowhood and caregiving. Collaborators on this work have included: Felix Elwert, Paul Allison, and Jack Iwashyna.

The team of faculty investigators working on health and social networks includes: James Fowler, James O'Malley, Alan Zaslavksy, Nancy Keating, Peter Marsden, Tom McGuire, and Niels Rosenquist. This work is supported by a program project grant from the National Institute on Aging entitled "Networks and Neighborhoods" and by a Pioneer Grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

© 2008 Nicholas Christakis