Understanding Family Networks and Implications for Maternal Health
Summary
This project advances the science of how families shape maternal and child health by exploring the usefulness of social network methods to better measure who is in one's family and how the family operates as a unit. This approach will break new ground by incorporating all non-nuclear or non-residential family members who are significant to an individual and characterizing family interactions as a whole. We will examine how properties of family network structure (e.g., density or transitivity) and relational content (e.g., support or conflict) are associated with pregnancy-induced hypertension, maternal depression, and cesarean delivery.