\u201cThe bulk of the interventions used to prevent the spread of HIV, for example, are designed for urban areas,\u201d said Dombrowski, who heads the initiative. \u201cPuerto Rico makes a nice test case for other rural areas, especially when we look at Native American populations, which have much higher hepatitis C rates than most.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dombrowski and collaborators are surveying Puerto Rican drug users to understand how they form social relationships and communicate information. Computers help analyze how social networks evolve over time in relation to risky behavior. This information will help researchers identify effective interventions. A $2.9 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health\u2019s National Institute for Drug Abuse supports this work.<\/p>\n
\u201cSocial network\u00a0analysis is an\u00a0innovative method that we feel could\u00a0go a long way\u00a0toward helping\u00a0us understand\u00a0what is and\u00a0is not working.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In a different setting, Dombrowski is using similar social network analysis to study suicide prevention strategies in Alaskan native populations, where suicide rates, like those in Midwestern native populations, are high. He collaborates with University of Massachusetts Amherst colleagues on this work funded by NIH\u2019s Institute for Mental Health.<\/p>\n
\u201cSocial network analysis is an innovative method that we feel could go a long way toward helping us understand what is and is not working,\u201d Dombrowski said.<\/p>\n
UNL\u2019s Minority Health Disparities Initiative also is training the next generation to use social network analysis to solve minority health issues. In summer 2015, it hosted 10 undergraduates from around the nation who studied and worked with UNL research mentors. This new program, funded by a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates grant, is the nation\u2019s only REU to explore minority health disparities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Roughly 80 percent of injecting drug users in rural Puerto Rico have hepatitis C and about 7 percent have HIV. A UNL sociologist is studying how drug users\u2019 social lives influence disease spread. This could lead to effective prevention strategies for rural areas. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":300,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2,1],"tags":[72,71,73,68,75,69,14,150,74,66,76,70,67],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ored-home","category-stories","category-uncategorized","tag-drug-use","tag-kirk-dombrowski","tag-minority-health-disparities-initiative","tag-national-institute-for-drug-abuse","tag-national-institute-for-mental-health","tag-national-institutes-of-health","tag-national-science-foundation","tag-nih","tag-puerto-rico","tag-research-experience-for-undergraduates","tag-social-networks","tag-sociology","tag-suicide-prevention"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":439,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/439"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.unl.edu\/annualreport\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}