Background and Purpose - Collaborationswithin public health are important for promoting positive community-wide change in health policies and outcomes. Community health coalitions have been created to help foster communication and collaboration. Coalition effectiveness is important to the communities they serve. Active participation, diversity, collaboration, and group cohesion may lead to greater coalition effectiveness. These factors can be measured and better understood using social network analysis (SNA). SNA is a set of theories and methodologies that examines how individuals or organizations connect, interact, communicate, and influence each other. These interactions and connections can be associated with various outcome measures. Leaders of organizations with more central positions in coalition networks report a greater feeling of coalition success. Changes in the number of ties within a network and an increase in centralization may increase adoption of programs and practices.
Objectives - This presentation will describe the Olympic Peninsula Healthy Community Coalition (OPHCC) in Clallam County, Washington as a case study. Specifically, we will examine correlations between the organization’s characteristics and network measures such as centrality, degree, and betweenness. These network measures will then be related to perceived satisfaction or success. We will also examine the spread of 5210 implementation as a diffusion of innovation example within the health coalition.
Methods - OPHCC organization representatives were surveyed in September 2018 regarding organization information, feelings of satisfaction, and various ties within the coalition. Organization type, size, roles, and collaboration experiences were reported. SNA will be conducted with 6 networks in which each organization representative listed organizations with which they: collaborated, competed, made formal agreements, received funds, donated funds, and wished to have more interactions. Regression models will be conducted in the fall of 2018 to analyze predictors of network position as well as satisfaction outcomes.
Results - This presentation will include results of the described analyses as well as how this coalition relates to past research on coalitions and random graph modeling procedures.
Conclusions - Collaborations within coalitions may have great importance for perceived success of coalition members, individually and collectively. Coalition structure may play a role in implementation and future collaborations. The results of this SNA will allow us to examine these.