Feinberg Prof. Michelle Birkett discussed how structural inequities and social networks affect HIV prevalence at a Northwestern Institute for Policy Research colloquium in Chambers Hall on Monday.
In her research, Birkett found that differences in HIV rates between populations can be explained by how social interactions vary across different demographics. Her geospatial investigation on HIV demographics helped her obtain a deeper understanding of the systemic causes of health disparities, she said.
“Through systematic measurement of those interactions and how those interactions vary across different populations, we can start to tell the story about the structural inequities and how they trickle down into creating health disparities for the most marginalized population,” Birkett said.
Birkett said in her speech that she hopes the government and other stakeholders can use this information to better understand patients and improve treatments and prevention measures.
Most interventions for patients with HIV currently focus on enrolling them in training to learn the importance of contraception and medicine, Birkett said. However, she wants attention to be shifted away from individual-level interventions to improving structural inequities like access to resources, doctors and education.
“(Current HIV interventions) very much ignore the reality that people’s lives are kind of terrible,” Birkett said. “Maybe (their) biggest priority isn’t taking (their) medicine. It is working these three jobs. It is taking care of (their) family.”
Since 2016, Birkett and her team have been building Network Canvas, a platform that visually represents social networks. In her most recent project, she used this tool to build models that reflect real-world demographic and social interaction patterns to understand their impact on health among marginalized populations.
Alex Ben Ghanem, a Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science research data analyst who attended the event, said they enjoyed that Birkett understood the complexities of the issue, including how geography affects HIV transmission.
“(Geospatial information) tells us a lot about who we meet, how we meet them, where we meet them and (eventually) who we are as well,” Ben Ghanem said.
They said people should take more things into consideration when they’re trying to understand something like the physical health of LGBTQ+ individuals.
Regina Seo, an economist in the School of Education and Social Policy’s Research and Innovation for Social and Economic Inclusion Lab, said she attended the event because she was interested in structural determinants of health and hoped to learn from Birkett’s research.
“It’s a different line of work than what I’m used to. The way we approach answering a question differs,” Seo said. “But the types of questions that we try to answer are very similar. So I just wanted to learn different methods.”
Aline da Silva Frost, a psychology researcher who attended the event, is planning to do some kind of research in building network models in the future.
Both Seo and da Silva Frost said they are excited to see if Network Canvas could be applicable to their research.
“This work is really good work. It’s really solid,” da Silva Frost said. “It’s very transdisciplinary using computational approaches, network models and studying inequality between different demographics.”
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