Fondazione Cariplo Funds Research on Immigrants' Networks and Their Health

Fondazione Cariplo has decided to finance NetHealth (Immigrants' social network and the transmission of health-related behaviors and outcomes), a 1-year research project hosted by Bocconi's Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy, with a 50,000-euro grant.

The principal investigators, Carlo Devillanova and Alessia Melegaro, have been researching different angles of the question for years. Melegaro studies the effects of social networks on the spread of infectious diseases, while Devillanova studies the transmission of information through immigrants' networks. The new project aims to map the network structure of social contacts among documented and undocumented immigrants in Milan and to assess its role in shaping their health behaviors and conditions.

Along with the two principal investigators, the project will involve Marco Bonetti, a professor of Statistics, and Emanuele Del Fava, a post-doc researcher in biostatistics, because the project will introduce a new sampling strategy called Network Sampling with Memory (NSM), developed by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and never used in Europe. The technique should overcome one of the major limitations of immigrants' surveys: the difficulty to reach undocumented immigrants and new arrivals.

"To our knowledge this will be the first map of social networks structures of irregular immigrants in a major European city", Devillanova says, "and the results of the study will help policy-makers design more effective interventions, such as increasing access to vaccination programs and circulation of information regarding healthy behaviors".