Is obesity contagious? Social networks vs. environmental factors in the obesity epidemic.

By Ethan Cohen-Cole, Jason M. Fletcher. 2008

227 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Health, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

Citations in the corpus

• Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, neutral): “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 inf”
• Editorial Expression of Concern and Correction (2014, unknown): “The interpretation of this network effect as contagion of mood has come under scrutiny due to the study’s correlational nature, including concerns over misspecification of contextual variables or failure to account for shared experiences (4, 5), raising important questions regarding contagion proces”
• NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS: ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND LOOKING BEYOND THEM* (2010, unknown): “The importance of precision for identification and the usefulness of economic models is demonstrated by the work of Cohen-Cole and Fletcher (2008), who”
• Peer influences on adolescent alcohol consumption: evidence using an instrumental variables/fixed effect approach (2011, unknown): “See Cohen-Cole and Fletcher (2008c) for an example where one can estimate large “social effects” for outcomes where the true social effect is zero, such as the transmission of height.”
• Using facebook and text messaging to deliver a weight loss program to college students (2013, unknown): “Studies have examined the influence of one’s social network on chances of becoming obese (16,17) and whether obesity could spread within a social network, like a ‘‘conta-gion’’ (16,17).”
• Imitative Obesity and Relative Utility (2009, unknown): “4 A forthcoming critique of Christakis and Fowler (2007) is that of Cohen-Cole and Fletcher (2008).”
• Causal diagrams for interference (2014, unknown): “The rising prominence of social networks in public health research underscores the need for methods that take into account the interconnections among individuals’ treatments and outcomes (Christakis and Fowler, 2007; Cohen-Cole and Fletcher, 2008; Mulvaney-Day and Womack, 2009).”
• You Tweet What You Eat: Studying Food Consumption Through Twitter (2014, unknown): “Thus, we correlate the caloric values of foods mentioned in tweets per each state to the obesity rates 8 (from 2012 ) and the incidence of diabetes 9 ( 2005 − 2007 by Body Mass Index (BMI) – a person’s mass divided by the square of their height – with BMI > 30 considered obese.”
• Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks (2014, unknown): “The interpretation of this network effect as contagion of mood has come under scrutiny due to the study’s correlational nature, including concerns over misspecification of contextual variables or failure to account for shared experiences (4, 5), raising important questions regarding contagion proces”
• Young Adults Living with Their Parents and the Influence of Peers (2018, unknown): “[18] Cohen-Cole, E.”
• A Survey of Statistical Network Models (2009, unknown): “For example Cohen-Cole and Fletcher note that there are plausible alternative explanations to the network structure based on contextual factors [77], and in a separate paper demonstrate that the same methodology detects “implausible” social network effects for such medical conditions as acne and hea”