Abstract
Community-based physical activity programs, such as the Recreovía, are effective in promoting healthy behaviors in Latin America. To understand Recreovías’ challenges and scalability, we characterized its social network longitudinally while studying its participants’ social cohesion and interactions. First, we constructed the Main network of the program’s Facebook profile in 2013 to determine the main stakeholders and communities of participants. Second, we studied the Temporal network growth of the Facebook profiles of three Recreovía locations from 2008 to 2016. We implemented a Time Windows in Networks algorithm to determine observation periods and a scaling model of cities’ growth to measure social cohesion over time. Our results show physical activity instructors as the main stakeholders (20.84% nodes of the network). As emerging cohesion, we found: (1) incremental growth of Facebook users (43–272 nodes), friendships (55–2565 edges), clustering coefficient (0.19–0.21), and density (0.04–0.07); (2) no preferential attachment behavior; and (3) a social cohesion super-linear growth with 1.73 new friendships per joined user. Our results underscore the physical activity instructors’ influence and the emergent cohesion in innovation periods as a co-benefit of the program. This analysis associates the social and healthy behavior dimensions of a program occurring in natural environments under a systemic approach.
Highlights
In low- and middle-income countries, non-communicable diseases cause 48% of annual deaths, which are mainly attributed to health-related behaviors (Allen et al, 2017; Riley et al, 2017)
Our analysis underscores the social cohesion emerging as a co-benefit of the program, and the importance of physical activity instructors in the Recreovía
We identified that the implementation of new classes in the parks and marketing promotion strategies through social media were associated with increases in the cohesion of the Temporal network
Summary
In low- and middle-income countries, non-communicable diseases cause 48% of annual deaths, which are mainly attributed to health-related behaviors (Allen et al, 2017; Riley et al, 2017). The World Health Organization promotes physical activity as an effective behavior to prevent noncommunicable diseases (Basu & Dutta, 2008), recently reframed as socially transmitted conditions (Allen & Feigl, 2017). It is crucial to take into account that the environment can profoundly affect health outcomes and behaviors. An interplay of individuals’ attributes, behaviors, and the structure of the social interactions in the places where they occur frame those environments (El-Sayed et al, 2012). Developing programs that employ social structures already inherent in our communities may provide a cost-efficient way of encouraging individuals to engage in regular physical activity through social support and cohesion (Hoehner et al, 2008; Shelton et al, 2019)
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