School of Social & Political Sciences

The School welcomes Dr. Emily Long, who has been awarded a Medical Research Council Skills and Development Fellowship. Emily recently completed her PhD in psychology from Utah State University in the United States, with a focus on social network analysis and health behaviour development.

To this end, Emily has used complex network methodologies, such as stochastic actor-oriented models and exponential random graph models, to explicitly investigate the mechanisms through which social connections impact health behaviour, and simultaneously, how health influences the structure of a social network.

During her MRC fellowship, Emily will use multilevel social network methods to uncover important variations in the relationship between social networks and health. She is interested in expanding the scope of quantitative methods available to examine longitudinal network data, particularly in the multilevel context. In addition, Emily will use extant data on social network interventions to investigate the underlying social mechanisms through which network interventions impact behavioural change.

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First published: 1 October 2018