Advancing Social Work Research with Applied Mathematics: Social Network Analysis at the Interface of Criminal Justice and Mental Health Systems

Much of social work research is focused understanding the ways in which people and organizations connect with each other and with their environments. Network analysis is a branch of mathematics dedicated to representing connections between entities as a mathematical object known as a network, and studying the various properties of these networks, such as connectivity, efficiency of information flow, the communities into which these entities segregate, etc. In recent years, the application of network analysis to social work has expanded given the relevance of these analytic methods to the field and the importance of social networks in addressing social problems, especially issues of social justice. This workshop will describe a multi-year, multidisciplinary collaboration between applied mathematics and social work and will demonstrate and discuss common analytic challenges with survey data and networks that were addressed through this collaboration.

This workshop will be facilitated by an applied mathematician and a social work researcher who will describe their collaboration on an analysis of a dataset pertaining to interorganizational relationships between community-based service providers and probation agencies. The social networks of these agencies are central to the treatment and care of individuals under community supervision who have mental health conditions or co-occurring substance use disorders. Network analysis can aid in the understanding of how agency networks interact, which is critical to the implementation and dissemination of interventions that require collaboration, trust and information sharing among individuals and agencies providing services for justice-involved individuals with mental illnesses.

This workshop will cover the benefits and challenges of a collaboration between social work and applied mathematics, generally, but will primarily focus on content related to the specific analytic methods used in this study of the social networks of criminal justice and social service agencies involved in the implementation of specialty mental health probation. The workshop will focus on (1) the justification for network analysis for our study questions, (2) the process of modeling this survey data as a network, and (3) considerations and complicating factors (e.g., incompleteness) that come from using survey data to model social networks.

This workshop will highlight the benefit of collaboration between social work research and applied mathematics, and encourage exploration into expanding the application of novel methods of analysis, such as network analysis, into new areas for social work research.