Social Networks, Health Support, and Dietary Intake in Mothers Receiving Home Visiting Services

Home visiting programs (HVPs) provide services to pregnant individuals and parents of young children to improve families' health and well-being. However, little is known about these families' social contexts. This study explores the social networks and dietary intake of mothers enrolled in a HVP, focusing on health support and health undermining. Cross-sectional data from 76 mothers enrolled in a HVP in Los Angeles County were collected by interview, using validated measures. Almost all mothers (95.7%) had one or more health supporters, while 55.1% had one or more health underminers. Some key findings related to health support were that mothers with higher income had more health supporters in their network (b = 1.36, p = 0.03), and network members were more likely to be health supporters if they were a romantic partner (OR = 3.41, p < 0.001), a resource-based connection (OR = 3.46, p < 0.01), or if they lived in the same neighborhood as the mother (OR = 1.68, p < 0.05). Further, having a health supporter who lived in the same neighborhood was associated with consuming more (1 + daily servings) vegetables (OR = 3.0, p < 0.05) and no sugar-sweetened beverages (OR = 0.29, p < 0.05). There were fewer findings related to health undermining: network members more likely to be underminers were romantic partners (OR = 8.93, p < .0001), and those perceived as having overweight or obesity (OR = 3.98, p < 0.001), but health undermining did not predict dietary intake. Overall, a broad set of network features were linked with health support, and given that some types of support were linked with better diet, network-based diet interventions leveraging health support may be effective in this priority population.