The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years.

By Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler. 2007

531 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Health, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Health

1. Lisa R. Goldberg
2. David M. J. Lazer
3. D. Dunning
4. Joanna E. Anderson
5. Peter V. Marsden
6. A. O’Malley
7. Nicholas A. Christakis
8. Emre Kıcıman

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

1. Lisa R. Goldberg
2. David M. J. Lazer

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Alexandra Olteanu
2. Carlos Castillo
3. Huan Liu
4. Fernando Diaz
5. Lei Tang
6. Emre Kıcıman
7. A. O’Malley
8. David M. J. Lazer

Citations in the corpus

• Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “While Christakis and Fowler (2007) found obesity to spread through peer influence in social networks, others suggest that unobserved confounds correlating with the social network structure (Lyons, 2011) or environmental exposure (Cohen-Cole and Fletcher, 2008) may be the culprit rather than peer…”
• The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect† (2019, background): “From a mathematical perspective, an important application is Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler’s 2007 study described in Christakis and Fowler (2007) arguing that obesity is contagious.”
• Behavioral Norms: Variants and Their Identification (2014, background): “Researchers have captured how social networks transmit such diverse behaviors as obesity, smoking, personal happiness, and divorce from person to person (Christakis & Fowler, 2007, 2008; Fowler & Christakis, 2008; McDermott, Fowler, & Christakis, 2013).”
• Community Detection and Mining in Social Media (2010, background): “Employing influence tests, some observe influence effect in obesity (Christakis and Fowler, 2007), service adopters in a telecommunication firm (Hill et al.”
• Networks in Political Science: Back to the Future (2011, background): “Longitudinal data are also powerful in discerning causal direction, for which the observation of temporal precedence may allow an inference of causal order (Snijders 2005; Christakis and Fowler 2007).”
• Tastes, ties, and time: A new social network dataset using Facebook.com (2008, background): “van Duijn et al., 2003; Martin and Yeung, 2006; Kossinets and Watts, 2006; Steglich et al., 2006; Christakis and Fowler, 2007 ), such that our understanding of how complex social networks evolve has already increased dramatically.”
• The analysis of social networks (2008, background): “…al. 1997); familial and friendship networks that may influence dietary practices, exercise habits, and other behaviors affecting the risk of obesity (Christakis and Fowler 2007) or of smoking (Christakis and Fowler 2008); sexual partnership networks that may raise or reduce the risk of…”
• Proximity and Innovation: From Statics to Dynamics (2015, background): “…the idea that social networks tend to diffuse behavioural norms and shape individual’s characteristics as diverse as happiness (CACIOPPO et al., 2009), smoking (MERCKEN et al., 2010), drinking (STEGLICH et al., 2010), criminality (DIJKSTRA et al., 2010) or obesity (CHRISTAKIS and FOWLER, 2007).”
• The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Experiment (2010, unknown): “(iii) This study eliminates the possibility for social ties to change and thereby identifies the effects of network structure on the dynamics of diffusion without the confounding effects of homophilous tie formation (1, 20).”