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Social Media Influencing Health Behaviors

by Kathy Jones on Jul 7 2012 10:59 PM

 Social Media Influencing Health Behaviors
A new study conducted by researchers at University of Southern California has found that more and more people are being influenced by social media networks with regards to their health behavior.
Researchers led by Thomas Valente, from USC’s Keck School of Medicine, said that social networks could be an effective weapon in influencing the health decisions of people, be it encouraging students at a local school to lose excess weight or educate them about the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in a community.

“I would design different interventions for the different groups. We constantly are concerned about how ineffective our interventions are — this is a big reason why those interventions are not working. We can do a much better job promoting healthy behaviors if we understand the social network contexts and design these interventions with those cues in mind”, Valente said.



Source-Medindia


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