Multilevel network interventions: Goals, actions, and outcomes

• Published in: Social networks 2023-01, Vol.72, p.108-120
• Main Authors: Robins, Garry, Lusher, Dean, Broccatelli, Chiara, Bright, David, Gallagher, Colin, Karkavandi, Maedeh Aboutalebi, Matous, Petr, Coutinho, James, Wang, Peng, Koskinen, Johan, Roden, Bopha, Sadewo, Giovanni Radhitio Putra
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0378-8733; 1879-2111; 1879-2111; 0378-8733
• DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2022.09.005

COVID-19 has resulted in dramatic and widespread social network interventions across the globe, with public health measures such as distancing and isolation key epidemiological responses to minimize transmission. Because these measures affect social interactions between people, the networked structure of daily lives is changed. Such largescale changes to social structures, present simultaneously across many different societies and touching many different people, give renewed significance to the conceptualization of social network interventions. As social network researchers, we need a framework for understanding and describing network interventions consistent with the COVID-19 experience, one that builds on past work but able to cast interventions across a broad societal framework. In this theoretical paper, we extend the conceptualization of social network interventions in these directions. We follow Valente (2012) with a tripartite categorization of interventions but add a multilevel dimension to capture hierarchical aspects that are a key feature of any society and implicit in any network. This multilevel dimension distinguishes goals, actions, and outcomes at different levels, from individuals to the whole of the society. We illustrate this extended taxonomy with a range of COVID-19 public health measures of different types and at multiple levels, and then show how past network intervention research in other domains can also be framed in this way. We discuss what counts as an effective network, an effective intervention, plausible causality, and careful selection and evaluation, as central to a full theory of network interventions. •We extend the theory of social network interventions to public health measures introduced to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.•Our categorization of interventions adds a multilevel dimension, a key feature of any society and implicit in any network.•We distinguish goals, actions, and outcomes at different levels, from individuals to the whole of the society.•We illustrate our taxonomy by COVID-19 measures and in criminal, organizational, educational, and health contexts.•Intervention outcomes can occur simultaneously across different levels with results that may confound intervention success.•We discuss network effectiveness, causal inferences, the selection and evaluation of interventions, and ethical issues.