The questionnaire will be administered through an interview using electronic devices by employees of the BVA-DOXA research institute. Questionnaire-based interviews will be conducted in Ossago Lodigiano and will involve residents...
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Research
The central activity of the project is to reconstruct the set of social relationships in a specific community. The aim is to identify the origin and spread of health behaviors among related individuals according to the theoretical and methodological perspective of social contagion.
To accomplish this, first, a questionnaire will be administered by a BVA-DOXA interviewer to collect information on the socio-demographic characteristics, health behaviors, and social ties of residents of the municipality of XXX. Afterwards, some participants will be offered to participate in an interview to explore certain topics in more detail.
Data will be anonymized after being collected, making it impossible to obtain sensitive personal information about respondents or other persons mentioned, in accordance with current privacy legislation and GDPR (EU 2016/679).
The data collected will enable us to answer the research questions of the project through the application of multivariate statistical techniques for data representation, data reduction, and hypothesis testing. We will use data analysis software such as STATA, R, and GEPHI, which can visualize the networks and calculate metrics and statistics related to the networks.
The example in the figure illustrates a hypothetical social network. It is a representation of relationships between people. Each circle corresponds to a person while the arrows between the circles indicate that there is a relationship between the subjects. Circles/people not connected with an arrow do not have a frequent or deemed relevant (according to the definition adopted) relationship between them. Circles colored white indicate people who have adopted a certain behavior (e.g., smokers, drinkers, physically active) while purple circles indicate those who have not.
People involved
All residents of Ossago Lodigiano, a municipality in the province of Lodi, aged between 18 and 70, willing to participate in the research, will be involved. The subjects will be contacted by BVA-DOXA in collaboration with the Municipality of Ossago Lodigiano.
