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Africa
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Using complexity science in community health promotion
Published in David Kernick, Helen Bevan, Complexity and Healthcare Organization, 2018
Innovation and improvisation were encouraged in changing the aspects of culture, customs and tradition that increased heart risk, reaching deep into the community at multiple levels. This entailed tapping into community links and strengths, through not only structures but methods of function. In addition to seeking health promotion through established structures and organizations like places of worship, schools and health seminars, health messages were sent by word of mouth to families and friends attending social and other functions, and at shopping plazas and businesses, and cultural and other events not traditionally associated with health promotion. Network connections and random contacts amplified information transfer and the spread of ideas through what is now recognized as the power of linkages, the ‘small world’ phenomenon and information cascades in complex systems.11-14
Vaccine hesitancy ‘outbreaks’: using epidemiological modeling of the spread of ideas to understand the effects of vaccine related events on vaccine hesitancy
Published in Expert Review of Vaccines, 2018
Alison B. Wiyeh, Sara Cooper, Chukwudi A. Nnaji, Charles S. Wiysonge
Various authors have indeed drawn upon and modified standard epidemiological models to better understand the manner in which rumors and news spread [55–59]. One such modification is the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Skeptics (SEIZ) [60] model of the spread of ideas, proposed by Bettencourt and colleagues. This model proposed two new categories of people; ‘exposed’ (E) and ‘skeptics’ (Z). Exposed are people who take some time before they become ‘infected’ and skeptics are people who stifle the spread of ideas. Whether or not and how soon these two classes become infected will depend on personal and environmental factors [60,61]. Bettencourt and colleagues used this model to quantitatively model the advent and spread of Feynman diagrams by communities of physicists in the United States, Japan, and USSR. Though the model was initially used to model long term idea adoption processes, Jin and colleagues successfully used this model to characterize information cascades in Twitter resulting from four news topics and four rumors [61].
On the validity of summative entrustment decisions
Published in Medical Teacher, 2021
Claire Touchie, Benjamin Kinnear, Daniel Schumacher, Holly Caretta-Weyer, Stanley J. Hamstra, Danielle Hart, Larry Gruppen, Shelley Ross, Eric Warm, Olle ten Cate
Other evidence to support the scoring inference can and should be generated. For example, it would be important to articulate the rationale for how entrustment decision committee members were chosen to optimize group decisions. Ensuring that the group contains diversity of opinion can foster task-conflict (cognitive differences owing to divergent views of a task) (Dai 2013), mitigate group-think (making decisions that preserve group unanimity at the potential cost of truth) (Janis 1971), and lead to better decisions (Hauer et al. 2016). Not all entrustment decision committee members may weigh assessment data similarly, and subjective impressions are not necessarily void of validity evidence, even if these are not reflected in rating forms or easy to express in words (Oudkerk et al. 2018; ten Cate and Regher 2019; van Enk and ten Cate 2020). Intersubjective judgment combined with portfolio data, supported by training of committee members, as well as front-line clinical teachers, is important to foster a shared understanding of what the assessment data mean (Kinnear et al. 2018). Evidence of having a shared mental model is important to support the scoring inference, even if the opinions differ. Cognitive biases could affect summative decisions (Dickey et al. 2017) and having training or strategies to mitigate these would support the scoring evidence. Summative group decisions can be influenced by social hierarchy (Lorenz et al. 2011), time pressures (Chahine et al. 2017), or information cascades (when an individual makes decisions on the basis of the observations and opinions of others) (Kinnear et al. 2020) that could affect the scoring inference. Having structured group processes for robust information sharing rather than simply ad hoc discussions would be important evidence that these are being mitigated.