The Niakhar Social Networks and Health Project.

This paper presents details of the design and implementation of the Niakhar Social Networks and Health Project (NSNHP), a large, mixed-methods project funded by the U.S. National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).

Social learning, influence, and ethnomedicine: Individual, neighborhood and social network influences on attachment to an ethnomedical cultural model in rural Senegal.

The preference in many parts of the world for ethnomedical therapy over biomedical alternatives has long confounded scholars of medicine and public health. In the anthropological literature cultural and interactional contexts have been identified as fundamental mechanisms shaping adherence to ethnomedical beliefs and health seeking behaviors. In this paper, we examine the association between individual, neighborhood, and social network characteristics and the likelihood of attachment to an ethnomedical cultural model encompassing beliefs about etiology of disease, appropriate therapeutic and preventative measures, and more general beliefs about metaphysics and the efficacy of health systems in a rural population in Eastern Senegal.

Individual, Community, and Social Network Influences on Beliefs Concerning the Acceptability of Intimate Partner Violence in Rural Senegal.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a pressing international public health and human rights concern. Recent scholarship concerning causes of IPV has focused on the potentially critical influence of social learning and influence in interpersonal interaction through social norms. Using sociocentric network data from all individuals aged 16 years and above in a rural Senegalese village surveyed as part of the Niakhar Social Networks and Health Project ( = 1,274), we estimate a series of nested linear probability models to test the association between characteristics of respondents' social networks and residential compounds (including educational attainment, health ideation, socioeconomic status, and religion) and whether respondents are classified as finding IPV acceptable, controlling for individual characteristics.