Mitchell Centre Seminar Series
| Dates: | 2 April 2025 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff |
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Dorottya Hoor UCL
A network typological approach to sexual and mental health in rural South-Africa.
While there has been substantial research examining the impact of social relationships on health, most studies tend to focus on isolated aspects of individuals’ social networks, such as their size, contact frequency, composition or perceived support. We therefore used a network typology approach to simultaneously account for structural (size, density, overall support) and compositional (gender, location, kin) network characteristics, and assessed how key sexual and mental health outcomes vary by different network configurations. We examined personal network data from 1176 young rural South Africans. Using Wards-linkage hierarchical clustering we found 4 distinct kinds of network: one alter low support, few alters low support, few alters moderate support and many alters high support. We then used regression techniques to link these network types to: HIV and HSV-2 serostatus; risky sexual behaviour; self-reported knowledge of, misinformation on and capacity for safe sexual practices; mental health and wellbeing. Our results show that while individuals with many alters and high support are not less likely to be living with HSV-2 or HIV, they perform better than all other groups on mental wellbeing and almost all risk factors for poor sexual health, including knowledge of safe sexual practices, belief in misinformation and high capability to adhere to safe sexual practices. In contrast, individuals with low support networks also exhibit more risky sexual behaviours and poorer mental health than those with highly supportive networks. These findings highlight the potential benefits of more targeted network-based preventive sexual health interventions amongst youth in resource constrained settings.
Travel and Contact Information
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G030
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
