Researchers have recently paid attention to social contact patterns among individuals due to their useful applications in such areas as epidemic evaluation and control, public health decisions, chronic disease research and social network research. Although some studies have estimated social contact patterns from social networks and surveys, few have considered how to infer the hierarchical stru...

Much research has shown that intergroup contact is associated with a reduction in prejudice. Far less attention been paid to the conditions promote contact. This explored role of normative social influence predicting engagement (total N = 1,538). Cross-sectional Study 1 found individuals’ perception descriptive levels amongst ingroup predicted their own whilst controlling for outgroup attitudes...

OBJECTIVES Social contact has been shown to be positively associated with cognitive functioning. It is unclear, however, whether all individuals can equally benefit from social contact with regard to their cognitive functioning. The goal of this study was to examine whether the beneficial effects of social contact are affected by individual differences in personality. METHOD We examined the B...

Current research on social integration and mental health operationalizes social integration as frequency of interactions and participation in social activities (i.e., social contact). This neglects the subjective dimension of social integration, namely group identification. We present two studies comparing the effect exerted by social contact and group identification on mental health (e.g., dep...

Introduction Pertussis (i.e., whooping cough) is on the rise in the US. To implement effective prevention and treatment strategies, it is critical to conduct timely contact tracing and evaluate people who may have come into contact with an infected person. We describe a collaborative effort between epidemiologists and public health informaticists at the Utah Department of Health (UDOH) to deter...

The purpose of this study was to determine if children with warm social contact with their parents (noncaretaking functions) are more responsive to social reinforcement than are children who are deprived of such contact.Data was gathered from interviews with mothers, who described the amount and quality of both parents' contact with the child. The sample of middle class children, 13 girls and 1...

According to the ‘median-voter’ hypothesis, greater inequality in the market distribution of earnings or income tends to produce greater generosity in redistributive policy. We outline the steps in the causal chain specified by the hypothesis and attempt to assess these steps empirically. Prior studies focusing on crosscountry variation have found little support for the median-voter model. We e...