Viewing Dissemination and Implementation Research through a Network Lens

Dissemination and implementation (D&I) are complex social and organizational processes by which new scientific discoveries and advances can be translated and transferred to people, settings, and communities to affect and improve public health. Despite their complexity, D&I processes can be viewed as a type of information transmission. A new scientific discovery (or innovation) is a piece of information that needs to be transferred to a different part of society, which can put that information to use. It turns out that this type of information transmission has important structural and relational properties that can best be understood using a relatively new systems science tool: network analysis. This chapter proposes a network analytic model of D&I and illustrates how network analysis can be used both to study and shape D&I processes and outcomes. Understanding the D&I process more fully through network analysis can be an important domain of D&I research.