Network properties of Informal Support Networks in Mental Health

Abstract

We analyze a dataset of citizens’ relations to a set of situations related to mental health. The dataset was collected by a digital tool created in the framework of Citizen Social Science. We generate two networks from it and compute different metrics to study them. In particular, we answer two particular questions: Do the experiences of young people in mental health differ from those of old people? and Are young people and old people in two different bubbles, i.e. are the mental health experiences they know from their respective surroundings different from each other? Their answers were determined by computing Newman’s assortativity coefficient but generalized to weighted networks.