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Effects of support network structure and position on cancer care experience

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Abstract

The social support that cancer patients receive from their social environment is extremely crucial for their cancer treatment. In this study, we develop a theoretical model to understand the effect of cancer patients’ support network on their experience with cancer care. To do so, the dataset of the National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (NCPES) 2010 was employed, which is among the largest datasets to capture patients’ experience with cancer care. However, the NCPES lacked clear affiliative information for conducting social network analytics and required a number of assumptions to be made regarding what constitutes evidence for a relationship. Python was used to extract social network data followed by Ego-net to calculate the social network properties of 43,674 cancer patients that have completed the survey. The results of Pearson correlation, T-test and hierarchical regression analysis demonstrated that cancer care experience is positively associated with ego density and degree centrality and negatively associated with efficiency. The findings are important for both the social network and healthcare community to improve the future service quality for patients.

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Data availability

The data analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Ziad Bassil for his assistance in developing and writing the Python code that was used for extracting affiliative information from the survey in an edge list format.

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Correspondence to Julian Fares.

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Fares, J., Chung, K.S.K. Effects of support network structure and position on cancer care experience. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 11, 35 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00740-4

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