Dynamics of Peer Counselling, Mothers and Family Social Networks for infant and young child feeding

Summary

Poor nutritional status of children is a major public health problem throughout the developing world and is the underlying cause for 35% of child deaths and 11% of the total global disease burden. (Black 2008) Inappropriate infant and young child feeding (IYCF) is an important predictor of poor growth, illness and death in infants and young children (Black 2008). Developing effective and sustainable interventions to improve IYCF will be integral components of efforts to reach the child survival and malnutrition Millennium Development Goals of developing countries. Our aim is to understand the influence of dynamics of social networks on the infant feeding decisions of women and their families in urban and rural and the extent to which the social networks of peer counsellors, who are promoting appropriate IYCF, impact on their effectiveness in changing feeding behaviours in developing economies (i.e., Bangladesh).

Supervisor(s)

Professor Liaquat Hossain, Dr Shahadat Uddin

Research Location

Civil Engineering

Program Type

Masters/PHD

Synopsis

Our specific aims are:

(i)To describe the social networks of women with children under one year of age in rural and urban settings;
(ii)To identify the role of social networks and their impact on decisions about IYCF;
(iii)To assess characteristics of the women’s social networks & feeding patterns & growth of their infants;
(iv)To describe the social networks of peer counselors in rural and urban settings in Bangladesh;
(v)To assess relationships between social networks & effectiveness in changing feeding behaviours; and,
(vi)To use this information to propose modifications to existing peer counseling programs to harness the women’s’ social networks to improve the efficiency of these behaviour change interventions.

Keywords

nutritional status of children, social networks, peer counseling programs, behaviour change, infant and young child feeding, IYCF

Opportunity ID

The opportunity ID for this research opportunity is: 1354

Other opportunities with Professor Liaquat Hossain

• Modeling Coordination through Social Networks
• Modeling Performance through Social Networks
• Studying Traders' Behaviour through Social Networks
• Social Networks on Preventive Healthcare: New approaches to Early Detection of Chronic Disease
• Early Detection of Insurance Fraud through Social Networks
• PhD project on Exploring Childhood Obesity through Social Networks
• PhD project on Adaptive multi-agency response coordination for managing distributed disease outbreaks
• BISoN: Biologically-Inspired Social Network Framework for Coordinated and Adaptive Emergency Response
• Dynamic Modeling of Bacterial and Organizational Colony Networks for Coordinated Response to Influenza
• Complex Coordination Dynamics in Disaster Response
• Self-Assembly and Self-Organization in Complex Distributed Systems
• Parallel Stochastic Optimization Algorithms
• MicroRNAs as Regulators of Cellular Programs
• Resilience and distributed systems for a healthy society
• Estimation and Inference in Environment Sensing Networks
• Biological metaphors and resilience
• Complex Networks and Performance
• Modeling biological interactions: from individuals to ecosystems
• Nutrition and the origin of phenotype
• Securing the future of water and soil
• Quantifying the return on investment in the Environment, Public Health and Individual Wellbeing.
• Exploring the link between international trade and the global obesity epidemic
• Sustainable Community Healthcare Networks
• Visualisation of High Dimensional Data.
• Do genes have memory?
• The evolutionary ecology of complex microbial communities
• Complex Brain Networks and Nutrition
• New approaches to Early Detection of Chronic Disease
• Social and Healthcare Network Effects on Delivery and Quality Of Care
• Physical, Mental and Psychological Health through Personal Networks
• Modeling Complex Coordination of Public Health Care

Other opportunities with Dr Shahadat Uddin

• Actor-based Dynamics of Longitudinal Networks
• Revisiting Node Centrality of Social Network Analysis
• Complex Coordination Dynamics in Disaster Response