Abstract
Information, behaviors, and technologies spread when people interact. Understanding these interactions is critical for achieving the greatest diffusion of public interventions. Yet, little is known about the performance of starting points (seed nodes) for diffusion. We track routine mass drug administration—the large-scale distribution of deworming drugs—in Uganda. We observe friendship networks, socioeconomic factors, and treatment delivery outcomes for 16,357 individuals in 3491 households of 17 rural villages. Each village has two community medicine distributors (CMDs), who are the seed nodes and responsible for administering treatments. Here, we show that CMDs with tightly knit (clustered) friendship connections achieve the greatest reach and speed of treatment coverage. Importantly, we demonstrate that clustering predicts diffusion through social networks when spreading relies on contact with seed nodes while centrality is unrelated to diffusion. Clustering should be considered when selecting seed nodes for large-scale treatment campaigns.
Highlights
Information, behaviors, and technologies spread when people interact
The study of seed nodes in social networks has assumed that after the initial subset of individuals are informed by the seed nodes, there is no need for subsequent individuals to directly contact seed nodes
An important open question remains: what determines spreading when seed nodes must directly contact potential recipients? we address this question by examining the diffusion of treatment through mass drug administration (MDA) and village friendship networks
Summary
Information, behaviors, and technologies spread when people interact. Understanding these interactions is critical for achieving the greatest diffusion of public interventions. Positive household coverage included eligible individuals who were visited by CMDs and refused treatment. To identify what factors determined the total reach and speed of household coverage in each village, we assessed measures of centrality[10] and local transitivity[31] of seed nodes.
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