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Modelling social care provision in an agent-based framework with kinship networks.

ABSTRACT: Current demographic trends in the UK include a fast-growing elderly population and dropping birth rates, and demand for social care among the aged is rising. The UK depends on informal social care-family members or friends providing care-for some 50% of care provision. However, lower birth rates and a greying population mean that care availability is becoming a significant problem, causing concern among policy-makers that substantial public investment in formal care will be required in decades to come. In this paper, we present an agent-based simulation of care provision in the UK, in which individual agents can decide to provide informal care, or pay for private care, for their loved ones. Agents base these decisions on factors including their own health, employment status, financial resources, relationship to the individual in need and geographical location. Results demonstrate that the model can produce similar patterns of care need and availability as are observed in the real world, despite the model containing minimal empirical data. We propose that our model better captures the complexities of social care provision than other methods, due to the socioeconomic details present and the use of kinship networks to distribute care among family members.

SUBMITTER: Gostoli U

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6689582 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Modelling social care provision in an agent-based framework with kinship networks.

Gostoli Umberto U Silverman Eric E

Royal Society open science 20190717 7

Current demographic trends in the UK include a fast-growing elderly population and dropping birth rates, and demand for social care among the aged is rising. The UK depends on informal social care-family members or friends providing care-for some 50% of care provision. However, lower birth rates and a greying population mean that care availability is becoming a significant problem, causing concern among policy-makers that substantial public investment in formal care will be required in decades t ...[more]

PMID: 31417710

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Project description:The prevalence of adolescent overweight and obesity (hereafter, simply "overweight") in the US has increased over the past several decades. Individually-targeted prevention and treatment strategies targeting individuals have been disappointing, leading some to propose leveraging social networks to improve interventions. We hypothesized that social network dynamics (social marginalization; homophily on body mass index, BMI) and the strength of peer influence would increase or decrease the proportion of network member (agents) becoming overweight over a simulated year, and that peer influence would operate differently in social networks with greater overweight. We built an agent-based model (ABM) using results from R-SIENA. ABMs allow for the exploration of potential interventions using simulated agents. Initial model specifications were drawn from Wave 1 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We focused on a single saturation school with complete network and BMI data over two waves (n = 624). The model was validated against empirical observations at Wave 2. We focused on overall overweight prevalence after a simulated year. Five experiments were conducted: (1) changing attractiveness of high-BMI agents; (2) changing homophily on BMI; (3) changing the strength of peer influence; (4) shifting the overall BMI distribution; and (5) targeting dietary interventions to highly connected individuals. Increasing peer influence showed a dramatic decrease in the prevalence of overweight; making peer influence negative (i.e., doing the opposite of friends) increased overweight. However, the effect of peer influence varied based on the underlying distribution of BMI; when BMI was increased overall, stronger peer influence increased proportion of overweight. Other interventions, including targeted dieting, had little impact. Peer influence may be a viable target in overweight interventions, but the distribution of body size in the population needs to be taken into account. In low-obesity populations, strengthening peer influence may be a useful strategy.

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Dataset Information

Modelling social care provision in an agent-based framework with kinship networks.

Publications

Modelling social care provision in an agent-based framework with kinship networks.

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