Networks of trust and transmission: mapping COVID-19 information flows in a Philippine Barangay

COVID-19 health communication research has largely focused on institutional messaging, mass media, and platform dynamics, offering limited insight into how health knowledge is socially produced and stabilized within everyday community relations. This study advances existing scholarship by examining convergence as an emergent network process shaped by informal interpersonal communication and gendered communicative labor in a peripheral setting.

Using an integrated sociometric-qualitative design, the study surveyed 100 residents of Barangay Asuncion, Carmen, Davao del Norte. Sociograms were constructed to visualize interpersonal communication networks and complemented by qualitative interpretations grounded in Rogers and Kincaid's Convergence Model and Ipe's Knowledge Sharing Framework.

Findings indicate that COVID-19 knowledge converged primarily through informal interpersonal communication embedded in kinship and neighborhood relations rather than through direct institutional delivery. Social media functioned as a significant entry point for information, but knowledge became actionable only after interpersonal discussion and relational validation. Women, particularly mothers, occupied central network positions, performing gendered communicative labor that stabilized local knowledge and buffered uncertainty. However, dense trust-based networks also increased the risk of epistemic closure when credibility was assessed through relational proximity rather than verification.

Health communication in peripheral communities operates through a relational, socially contingent process, shaped by informal interpersonal networks and gendered labor. Informal communication functions as a critical social infrastructure through which health knowledge is negotiated and enacted during crises, challenging linear and institution-centred models of public health communication.