Networks 2 - Period 5

After having understood what networks are, and how networks work and what problems they may have, we move on to the question: how to use network information in an intervention? In this course you will design a practical (policy) intervention based on a thorough and critical analysis of that problem conducted in Networks 1. In Networks 1, a so called wicked problem, a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often challenging to identify, had been identified. During Networks 2, we shift focus, and instead of analysis we focus on potential interventions to address the wicked problem. During this course, we will mostly concentrate on social media based interventions. Social media has changed the way people communicate, develop and maintain their social networks, and get access to information. Recently, social media has gained a crucial role also in network based interventions and become an important tool for promoting socially valuable behavior change. During this course we discuss the features specific to social media and reflect on how these features may facilitate or hinder a social media intervention. We combine disciplines of communication science, media psychology and sociology. We discuss three different levels of social media intervention: individual level, when the intervention targets social media influencers; group level, when the intervention aims to empower a community or group of people, and the inductive level, where the intervention relies on word of mouth information distribution. Students are expected to use the knowledge acquired during the lectures in their designing an intervention.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) awards credits based on the ECTS system. Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA?s recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.