Some considerations concerning the challenge of incorporating social variables into epidemiological models of infectious disease transmission

Interpreting social determinants: Emergent properties and adolescent risk behaviour

“…We adopted a mixed methods approach: (a) a qualitative component investigating risk behaviours and risk environments in relation to one example of an emergent property, hope [28–31]; (b) a quantitative component, which investigated the relationship between a measure of hope, developed from the qualitative findings, and differences in self-reported alcohol consumption.…”

“…To provide a comparison we measured two other variables which capture how individuals see themselves and how they feel: these are happiness and life satisfaction. Both were included in the qualitative and quantitative components because, like hope, they may be “summary” indicators of individuals’ experience at the intersection of individual agency and social structure Barnett, Fournié [28]. We also compared the explanatory power of these variables with a measure of socio-economic status, an asset index.…”

“…It is the potential that the interpretation, which occurs because of interactions between individual, group and context, could help explain differences in risk behaviour, which underlies the emergent properties approach. Hope is of interest because it speaks to how the individual sees their future from within their social structural position [28], their “life world”, a possibly important determinant of their present-day behaviour. Hope, happiness and life-satisfaction are likely to be linked to both individual and group narratives.…”

A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Practices Exposing Humans to Avian Influenza Viruses, Their Prevalence, and Rationale

“…A challenge to achieve this is to access the relation between individual actions and the socioeconomic and cultural environment in which those actions are situated and produced. Recent theoretical61,62 and empirical works explored the use of emergent properties, such as “hope” or “disgust,” as quantitative variables capturing people’s experiences of the social, economic, and cultural world they inhabit. In Uganda, the level of hope that a person experienced was measured and found to be associated with some known risk factors for HIV infection 63.…”

Introduction to the World Association for Veterinary Dermatology and the Clinical Consensus Guidelines

“…This is important for the epidemiology of both dermatophytes and staphylococci––apparent from the differences in the incidence and prevalence of dermatophyte infections between hunting and working dogs and Persian and other cats . The social sciences contribute to understanding these problems individually or in concert with each other, ideally as a part of interdisciplinary studies across veterinary and social sciences . The kinds of problems we are dealing with here bear what the philosopher Wittgenstein described as a “family resemblance” to those explored by laboratory science; while the latter are often characterized by experimental design and statistical manipulation, the former are more often characterized by discursive similarity, overlapping but different concepts, and pragmatic resolutions rather than “truths”.…”