Abstract
BackgroundSocial network analysis is an approach to study the interactions and exchange of resources among people. It can help understanding the underlying structural and behavioral complexities that influence the process of capacity building towards evidence-informed decision making. A social network analysis was conducted to understand if and how the staff of a public health department in Ontario turn to peers to get help incorporating research evidence into practice.MethodsThe staff were invited to respond to an online questionnaire inquiring about information seeking behavior, identification of colleague expertise, and friendship status. Three networks were developed based on the 170 participants. Overall shape, key indices, the most central people and brokers, and their characteristics were identified.ResultsThe network analysis showed a low density and localized information-seeking network. Inter-personal connections were mainly clustered by organizational divisions; and people tended to limit information-seeking connections to a handful of peers in their division. However, recognition of expertise and friendship networks showed more cross-divisional connections. Members of the office of the Medical Officer of Health were located at the heart of the department, bridging across divisions. A small group of professional consultants and middle managers were the most-central staff in the network, also connecting their divisions to the center of the information-seeking network. In each division, there were some locally central staff, mainly practitioners, who connected their neighboring peers; but they were not necessarily connected to other experts or managers.ConclusionsThe methods of social network analysis were useful in providing a systems approach to understand how knowledge might flow in an organization. The findings of this study can be used to identify early adopters of knowledge translation interventions, forming Communities of Practice, and potential internal knowledge brokers.
Highlights
Social network analysis is an approach to study the interactions and exchange of resources among people
With respect to brokerage roles there were some coordinators with various job titles who were mainly approached by staff from the same division, who may or may not be connected to the other important actors such as managers and ‘professional consultants’ in the health department
This study provides a foundation for longitudinal network analysis of the effect of an organization-wide, tailored knowledge translation (KT) intervention on the capacity of one health department for evidenceinformed decision-making (EIDM)
Summary
Social network analysis is an approach to study the interactions and exchange of resources among people. It can help understanding the underlying structural and behavioral complexities that influence the process of capacity building towards evidence-informed decision making. A social network analysis was conducted to understand if and how the staff of a public health department in Ontario turn to peers to get help incorporating research evidence into practice. Acknowledging the importance of organizational factors in the KT process, context, culture and relationships have become key components of KT models [9,10,11], and more attention has been paid to the application of social and organizational concepts in developing KT models [12]
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