Extending Opinion Dynamics to Model Public Health Problems and Analyze Public Policy Interventions

The public health community is recognizing the importance of social network dynamics in analyzing diseases correlated with behaviors such as tobacco and alcohol use, substance abuse, and poor nutrition and inadequate physical activity. These behaviors are driven in part by opinions that individuals hold regarding products, behaviors, and lifestyles. The opinions and behaviors of individuals are influenced by their personal social networks as well as exogenous components such as advertisements. We extend the basic opinion dynamics model to include two processes important for analysis of diseases caused by unhealthy behaviors. The first is an antagonistic reaction that drives individuals further apart in opinion space; the second is the addition of hysteresis representing the constraint addiction places on an individual’s behaviors. We apply this extended model to consider tobacco use within a community and various approaches to influence its prevalence, including advertisements and health-related educational campaigns. We examine the roles of advertising strength, the strategic importance of tolerance, and how hysteresis in the behavioral function influences tobacco usage within a community. Finally, we show how spatially and temporally local results can act as inputs to a populationwide, long-term system dynamics model. This allows for the examination of the impact of interventions on future mortality.