Ce travail traite du réseau social de connaissance des personnes diabétiques et de leurs proches en rapport à l’utilisation des plantes médicinales, dans la localité de Korhogo. Il est question d’analyser le système de transmission des connaissances thérapeutiques traditionnelles du diabète. Ainsi, nous nous sommes proposés d’exposer la perception du malade et de son réseau quant à l’utilisation des plantes, d’identifier l’accessibilité de ces plantes et les méthodes utilisées dans le traitement traditionnel du diabète et enfin de décrire le mode de transmission de ces connaissances thérapeutiques traditionnelles utilisées dans le traitement du diabète. C’est par une approche mixte que nous avons vérifié ces hypothèses. Au terme de cette étude, il ressort que le système de transmission des connaissances thérapeutiques traditionnelles à Korhogo est fonction d’un réseau social qui influence les perceptions des malades quant à l’utilisation des plantes, et ce à travers un mode de transmission informel et pourtant impactant.

From foraging societies to online communities, human social networks exhibit striking structural regularities, characterized by densely connected local communities linked by bridging ties. However, it remains in question how these small-world patterns emerge alongside demographic processes and changes. Here, we provide a baseline investigation into the dynamics of both kin and non-kin social systems in response to the AIDS epidemic in a poorer, rural South African region. We combine multiple datasets to construct population-scale inter-household social networks from 2000 to 2016. Leveraging a quasi-experimental approach, we find that families are more likely to form distant, potentially non-kin ties following a mortality event. Coupled with increases in both network clustering and efficiency among close kin and distant ties, our findings suggest that the observed small-worldness in contemporary societies may be closely tied to the diversity of social connectivity in the wake of key demographic events.

Despite the rapid growth of the older never-married adult population, they remain underexplored—both as a distinct group and in comparison to their ever-married peers. Whether social integration mitigates or exacerbates disparities between older never- and ever-married adults remains unexamined. We integrate two competing theoretical frameworks—social precarity (or risk) versus social premium (or resilience) and social exacerbation versus social compensation—to investigate the relationship between lifelong singlehood and health, as well as the moderating role of social integration. Using longitudinal, nationally representative data from the Health and Retirement Study, our findings largely support the social precarity and social compensation models. Older never-married adults experience lower levels of social integration compared to their ever-married peers. However, their health benefits more from social integration than that of ever-married peers, suggesting that social connections play a particularly crucial role in mitigating health disparities for lifelong single adults.

Purpose: Assess how central community health worker (CHW) training institutions in Illinois facilitate access to standardized training opportunities and associated benefits or obscure persistent marginality in training practices.

Methods: A statewide survey asked CHWs (n=450) to name organizations where they received training and questions about their work per national efforts to standardize CHW training. A projected CHW network, with edges inferred from shared trainings, was analyzed for centrality metrics, core-periphery, and community structure. Further analyses removed high degree training institutions prior to projection of the network. Removal of the single highest degree institution resulted in a 72% decrease in network density but a 67% increase in average betweenness. Emergent analyses will use geographic networks to identify spatial clustering and bottlenecks in transportation infrastructure affecting CHWs and compare networks to non-network core-periphery characteristics using survey data.

Contributions: Community health workers are non-clinical agents of health equity, facilitating access to care, navigation of insurance, and addressing social determinants of health in vulnerable communities. Initial findings indicate that structural support of a few highly central training institutions may have generated an artificially large and dense core of CHWs in Illinois, while obscuring functional training communities and gatekeepers. Ongoing analyses will contribute to social network literature by validating or contraindicating the use of unipartite projections of training networks to represent access to core trainings and associated benefits and support training interventions themselves by assessing if and how amplification of core training institutions serves to standardize and unify CHW skills and opportunities across the state.