Background:
Social network analysis is an approach to study the interactions and exchange of resourcesamong people. It can help understanding the underlying structural and behavioralcomplexities that influence the process of capacity building towards evidence-informeddecision making. A social network analysis was conducted to understand if and how the staffof a public health department in Ontario turn to peers to get help incorporating researchevidence into practice.
Methods:
The staff were invited to respond to an online questionnaire inquiring about informationseeking behavior, identification of colleague expertise, and friendship status. Three networkswere developed based on the 170 participants. Overall shape, key indices, the most centralpeople and brokers, and their characteristics were identified.
Results:
The network analysis showed a low density and localized information-seeking network. Interpersonalconnections were mainly clustered by organizational divisions; and people tended tolimit information-seeking connections to a handful of peers in their division. However,recognition of expertise and friendship networks showed more cross-divisional connections.Members of the office of the Medical Officer of Health were located at the heart of thedepartment, bridging across divisions. A small group of professional consultants and middlemanagers were the most-central staff in the network, also connecting their divisions to thecenter of the information-seeking network. In each division, there were some locally centralstaff, mainly practitioners, who connected their neighboring peers; but they were notnecessarily connected to other experts or managers.
Conclusions:
The methods of social network analysis were useful in providing a systems approach tounderstand how knowledge might flow in an organization. The findings of this study can beused to identify early adopters of knowledge translation interventions, forming Communitiesof Practice, and potential internal knowledge brokers.