Change and instability: A multilevel analysis of AIDS-related conversational networks among Malawian women

This article examines changes in network structure using data on women’s AIDSrelated conversational networks from the 1998 and 2001 rounds of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideation Change project. The principal aims are to show that the structure of conversational networks can change significantly in relatively short periods and that multilevel analysis is an effective way to explore the scope of these types of changes. The article demonstrates that: (i) conversations about AIDS are increasingly occurring within and across all demographic groups in rural Malawi, (ii) AIDS-related conversational networks have therefore diversified, (iii) there is statistically significant village-level variance in characteristics of reported network partners, but it is a minimal source of total variance in such characteristics, and (iv) there is significant covariance between the estimated residuals associated with key predictors of size of the conversational networks. 1 Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel 91905. E-mail: [email protected] Demographic Research – Special Collection 1: Article 12 -Social Interactions and HIV/AIDS in Rural Africa -374 http://www.demographic-research.org