Some considerations concerning the challenge of incorporating social variables into epidemiological models of infectious disease transmission

Abstract

Incorporation of ‘social’ variables into epidemiological models remains a challenge. Too much detail and models cease to be useful; too little and the very notion of infection – a highly social process in human populations – may be considered with little reference to the social. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim proposed that the scientific study of society required identification and study of ‘social currents’. Such ‘currents’ are what we might today describe as ‘emergent properties’, specifiable variables appertaining to individuals and groups, which represent the perspectives of social actors as they experience the environment in which they live their lives. Here we review the ways in which one particular emergent property, hope, relevant to a range of epidemiological situations, might be used in epidemiological modelling of infectious diseases in human populations. We also indicate how such an approach might be extended to include a range of other potential emergent properties to represent complex social and economic processes bearing on infectious disease transmission.

Keywords:

• translational epidemiology
• social factors
• structural ‘drivers’
• infectious diseases
• hope

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Dr Catherine McGowan and Dr Shelley Lees for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Tony Barnett thanks Dr Erika Mansnerus for involving him in her postdoctoral work on models and sharing that work with him over several years and Dr Valerie Curtis and Dr Robert Aunger for spending time with him explaining and discussing their work and sharing an early draft of their latest book.

We would all like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and thorough reading of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This approach is of course not restricted to human populations but applies to populations of all living things.

2. This is a quote from a review of Mary Morgan's book The world in the model by Catherine Z. Elgin of Harvard University, http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-World-Model-Economists-Think/dp/0521176190, accessed 21 May 2014.

3. This in no sense means irrational. The source for this use of the term here is Max Weber's characterisation of the types of action, a typology derived from a means-end schema in which the rational types of action, zweckrationalität, wertrationalität, affectual and traditional action sit alongside a poorly defined realm of what Weber considers to be ‘non-social’ behaviour (see Weber & Parsons, 1947). This is the focus of the paragraph.

4. Elsewhere a related analysis of some of these described as ‘emotions’ is offered by Denton (2009).

5. Aunger and Curtis would not necessarily agree with this characterisation and use.

Additional information

Funding

This work benefited from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Professorial Fellowship award to Tony Barnett (RES O51-27-0016). Both Tony Barnett and Guillaume Fournié currently receive funding from the research programme ‘Controlling and monitoring emerging zoonoses in the poultry farming and trading system in Bangladesh: an interplay between pathogens, people, policy’. This is one of 11 programmes funded under ZELS, a joint research initiative between Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), Department for International Development (DFID), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Medical Research Council (MRC) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Sunetra Gupta is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow and received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement 268904 (DIVERSITY).

Janet Seeley is partly funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) under the MRC/DFID Concordat agreement.