A method for assessing the success and failure of community-level
interventions in the presence of network diffusion, social reinforcement, and
related social effects
Prevention and intervention work done within community settings often face
unique analytic challenges for rigorous evaluations. Since community prevention
work (often geographically isolated) cannot be controlled in the same way other
prevention programs and these communities have an increased level of
interpersonal interactions, rigorous evaluations are needed. Even when the
`gold standard' randomized control trials are implemented within community
intervention work, the threats to internal validity can be called into question
given informal social spread of information in closed network settings. A new
prevention evaluation method is presented here to disentangle the social
influences assumed to influence prevention effects within communities. We
formally introduce the method and it's utility for a suicide prevention program
implemented in several Alaska Native villages. The results show promise to
explore eight sociological measures of intervention effects in the face of
social diffusion, social reinforcement, and direct treatment. Policy and
research implication are discussed.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure