Pilot Analysis on Mother’s Social Network and Child Dental Utilization

Objectives: Social networks are crucial to understanding disease patterns and network norms associated with health promotion behaviors. We examined whether greater perceived professional dental care utilization in a mother’s social network was significantly associated with preventive dental utilization for her child. We hypothesized that mothers with more dental utilization in their social network would have a cultural norm of routine dental care, and thereby have improved child preventive dental utilization.
Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study that collected social network data on 70 mothers of children 3-5 years old enrolled in the Center for Oral Health Research in Appalachia study in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Quantitative social network data was collected using an in-person name generator survey that solicited connections that could impact her child’s oral health, including the mother’s subjective appraisal on whether each connection saw a dentist in the past year. The outcome, “any child preventive dental visit,” was treated as a binary variable. Unadjusted logistic regression was used to examine the association between the proportion of mothers’ connections with dental utilization in the past year and child preventive dental utilization.
Results: Approximately two-thirds of mothers reported child preventive dental utilization (n=46). Mothers whose children had preventive dental utilization reported that 82% of their connections saw a dentist in the past year, compared to 61% for mothers who did not have child preventive dental utilization. Having a greater proportion of dental utilization in mothers’ social networks was associated with a significantly greater odds of child preventive dental utilization (p<0.05).
Conclusions: This research is the first to use social network data and methods to examine whether mothers’ social network characteristics are associated with child oral health behaviors. Our results add to the literature on the impact of social environments on health outcomes.