173 - Application of social network analysis to evaluate community power building

Large grantmaking programs for building community power are designed to build up the local ecosystem of advocacy and base; however, it can be difficult to know how to evaluate that impact. Evaluators from the Institute for Community Health conducted a social network analysis (SNA) to analyze the impact of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Voices for Health Justice (VHJ) program. VHJ is a large grant program that supports 25 coalitions of 93 total community grassroots organizations, advocacy organizations, and policy organizations in 24 states. Using a longitudinal SNA, we are able to visually describe the overall relational network structure and to test hypotheses about the ways that the power of individual actors and the strength of relationships changed over time. 

Relevance Statement: Large scale grant-making in support of community power building is an increasingly popular advocacy strategy. The impact of this type of funding on local ecosystems of advocacy can be difficult to evaluate. Evaluations that center the complex and far-reaching relationships that make up these local ecosystems of advocacy help to provide a more complete story about the impact of this work and to ground the evaluation overall.1 A social network analysis (SNA), especially when used in partnership with qualitative methods and conducted at multiple timepoints, can be a useful method to examine the relationships of the partners that form local ecosystems.2 This roundtable discussion provides a case study example of a series of longitudinal SNAs as part of a larger mixed methods evaluation of a large scale grant project focused on building community power around health advocacy. Our roundtable discussion will focus on the utility of the SNA as a story telling tool. We present the SNA as a method of quantitative data collection that can help to visually portray the overall relational network structure and to test different hypotheses about the ways that the power of individual actors (centrality) and the strength of relationships (density) change over time. During the discussion we will share the results of three hypotheses and engage participants in a conversation about the utility of SNAs in alternate contexts. 1. Scott, J. (2012). What is social network analysis? (p. 114). Bloomsbury Academic. 2. Pow J, Gayen K, Elliott L, Raeside R. (2012) Understanding complex interactions using social network analysis. J Clin Nurs. 2012 Oct;21(19-20):2772-9.