Eric Jones

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

With climate change intensifying, building resilience against climate-related shocks is now a global imperative. Historically, many societies have faced natural hazards, with some adapting through specific social and cultural practices. Understanding these responses is key to developing modern sustainability strategies. Here, we address this issue...

Substance use-related problems continue to be a national public health crisis despite years of prevention efforts. Community anti-drug coalitions are well positioned to address substance use at local levels. Coalitions often rely on their members to connect to resources they need to address community issues and plan for sustainability over time. Su...

We used social network analysis (SNA) to identify the types of water-related conflicts between the users and members of the institutional arena of the Rio Mayo Irrigation District (RMID) within the ancestral territory of the Yoreme Mayo indigenous group in Sonora, northeastern Mexico. We combined ethnography with an analysis and visualization of bi...

In 2009, a fire occurred in the ABC Day Care Center in Hermosillo, Mexico, that killed and injured many children who were in attendance that day. This study investigated the association between the posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) of socially connected parents and caregivers whose children were affected by the fire. Parents and caregivers of th...

Objective This study sought to better understand the types of locations that serve as hubs for the transmission of COVID-19. Methods Contact tracers interviewed individuals who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 between November 2020 and March 2021, as well as the people with whom those individuals had contact. We conducted a 2-mode social network ana...

(1) Background: In Mexico, 76% of water consumed is used for crop irrigation, and close to half of this is used in 86 irrigation districts for agroindustry throughout the nation. The present study combines a political ecology approach with social networks analysis to identify how water-use-related information networks are structured according to th...

Previous studies indicate that obesity is a risk factor of suicide behaviors among adolescents. Whether this association has remained consistent during the ongoing obesity epidemic remains unknown. The time trends of the obesity–suicide association were examined using the 1999–2019 biannual Youth Risk Behavior Survey data (n = 161,606). Prevalence...

Background: Adolescents with obesity are more likely to exhibit suicide behaviors, but this association may be confounded by psychosocial stigma related to obesity. We examined whether the obesity is independently associated with suicide behaviors among United States adolescents, after adjusting for the psychosocial factors. Methods: We analyzed...

Background Previous studies indicate obesity is a risk factor of suicide behaviors among adolescents. Whether this association has remained consistent during the ongoing obesity epidemic remains unknown. Method The time trends of the obesity-suicide association were examined using the 1999–2019 biannual Youth Risk Behavior Survey data (n = 161,606...

Purpose The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to investigate whether obesity is associated with suicide attempt in a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. Methods From the 2004–2005 National Epidemiologic Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions Wave 2 data (n = 34,653 adults), survey responses were extracted on suicide attempt...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to test the feasibility, usability, and acceptability of implementing a web-based method for collecting social network and longitudinal daily interaction data from cancer survivors and their caregivers. Methods Young adult and sexual/gender minority cancer survivors and their informal caregivers were recruited...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to describe the social support networks and daily support interactions of cancer-affected individuals, including young adult (YA) and LGBTQIA+ survivors and care partners. Methods Participants were recruited at two United States cancer centers and via social media for a pilot study testing a novel online metho...

There is increased interest over the last decade in the use of Shared Decision Making with individuals with serious mental illness to improve engagement in treatment and clinical outcomes. We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 15 individuals with serious mental illness treated in an outpatient transitional care clinic serving peo...

Climate change is an increasingly pressing concern because it generates individual and societal vulnerability in many places in the world, and also because it potentially threatens political stability. Aside of sea-level rise, climate change is typically manifested in local temperature and precipitation extremes that generate other hazards. In this...

Background Over 5000 community anti-drug coalitions operating in the USA serve as a cornerstone of federal drug prevention. These coalitions, however, have demonstrated effectiveness in preventing substance use only when they use technical assistance (TA) and implement evidence-based programs (EBPs). The absence of TA and EBP implementation by coal...

Background Adolescent peers’ influence on tobacco smoking is a dynamic process affected by close friends and other network peers. Although research has examined the influence of immediate friends on smoking behavior (i.e., by cohesion exposure), the influence of all peers according to closeness (i.e., proximity exposure) remains unknown. This study...

Study of the impact of the tailing spill on the people along the Rio Sonora.

Considerado como el "peor desastre ambiental de la historia minera de México" el del derrame de tóxicos sobre el río Sonora, proveniente de la Mina Buenavista del Cobre, en Cananea, subsidiaria del Grupo México, es tratado de manera interdisciplinaria en esta investigación. Se conjugan la perspectiva de la antropología social con la ecología políti...

This study estimated gender differences in the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom network structure (i.e., the unique associations across symptoms) using network analysis in a Latin American sample. Participants were 1,104 adults, taken from epidemiological studies of mental health following natural disasters and accidents in Mexico and E...

Purpose of review: This review covers articles in 2018 and early 2019 that employed the concept of networks and social interactions in research on how patients with cancer cope, receive and respond to medical treatment and allied support. The use of social aspects, and more formally the method of social network analysis for research on cancer is q...

Little research is currently available that captures variation in the degree to which individuals who have, or had cancer in the past (but are in remission) integrate their cancer experience into their sense of self or their cancer-associated identity. Such research should cover how those identities shape personal narratives within existing or new...

In the state of Sonora, the 2009 Hermosillo ABC Day Care Center fire and the 2014 Cananea copper mine spill highlighted how deregulation and divestiture of state services by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN) served the interests of a few elites, who maintained rule through mechanisms of impunity: in oth...

Media coverage of mental health and other social issues often relies on episodic narratives that suggest individualistic causes and solutions, while reinforcing negative stereotypes. Community narratives can provide empowering alternatives, serving as media advocacy tools used to shape the policy debate on a social issue. This article provides heal...

We examine social aspects of risk perception in seven sites among communities affected by a flood in Mexico (one site), as well by volcanic eruptions in Mexico (one site) and Ecuador (five sites). We conducted over 450 interviews with questions about the danger people feel at the time (after the disaster) about what happened in the past, their curr...

Purpose Ember et al. (1992) addressed whether the “democracies rarely fight each other” hypothesis held true in the anthropological record of societies of various sizes and scales around the world. They indeed found that more participatory polities had less internal warfare – or warfare between one society’s territorial units (e.g. bands, villages,...

Ember et al. (1992) addressed whether the “democracies rarely fight each other” hypothesis held true in the anthropological record of societies of various sizes and scales around the world. They indeed found that more participatory polities had less internal warfare—or warfare between one society’s territorial units (e.g., bands, villages, district...

Background: Care management and care managers are becoming increasingly prevalent in primary care medical practice as a means of improving population health and reducing unnecessary care. Care managers are often involved in chronic disease management and associated transitional care. In this study, we examined the communication regarding chronic d...

Collaboration with diverse partners is challenging but essential for the implementation of prevention programs and policies. Increased communication with partners from diverse sectors may help community coalitions overcome the challenges that diversity presents. We examined these issues empirically in a study of 17 substance use prevention coalitio...

The authors apply longue durée and semiotic approaches to a case study of flood management in the American Midwest to critique the suggestion that naming the current geological epoch the ‘Anthropocene’ might encourage global environmental sustainability. It is unlikely that the Anthropocene moniker has the symbolic power to correct ecomyopia, which...

In this study, we explored the networks created after a day care fire in Hermosillo, Mexico, and examined the association of justice-seeking activities with posttraumatic stress and depression of parents and caretakers. We also looked at how political groups (created as the result of the traumatic event) were associated with symptoms of stress and...

It is well established that roughly twice as many women as men after disasters experience posttraumatic stress, and that their mean levels of posttraumatic stress are slightly to moderately higher. Social support is often a buffer for these impacts, but not always. Social responsibilities can exacerbate postdisaster stress. To seek a better underst...

We introduce this book and the field of disaster networks briefly in this chapter. We indicate what we mean by networks, and we advocate reading the rest of the book keeping the following things in mind since they're not always present or explicit in research in this field: the ways types of roles and types of relationships in disaster settings pro...

This chapter reviews social network analysis's contribution to alternatively complementary or conflicting conclusions about human behavior and relationships in disaster. The social network is a seductive concept in the anthropology of disasters—a potentially robust tool for investigating complex human and human-environment entanglements. What are t...

Social Network Analysis of Disaster Response, Recovery, and Adaptation covers systematic social network analysis and how people and institutions function in disasters, after disasters, and the ways they adapt to hazard settings. As hazards become disasters, the opportunities and constraints for maintaining a safe and secure life and livelihood beco...

Forty-nine infants and toddlers were killed and 93 others were injured in the ABC Daycare Center Fire disaster in Hermosillo, Mexico. This study describes the experiences of ten mental health professionals that researched the community scale grief and provided clinical services to the parents and caregivers of the affected children. A concurrent tr...

We conducted thirty-two interviews and four focus groups in Illinois after extensive flooding in 2008 to determine whether people use social networks in different ways when responding to different types of challenges before, during, and after the flood. Using a grounded theory approach to analyze narratives of interviewees recalling events, we code...

El 6 de agosto de 2014, ocurrió el “peor desastre ambiental de la historia minera de México” según palabras del Srio. de la Semarnat. Lixiviados de cobre, almacenados en una de las presas de jales de la Mina Buenvista del Cobre (Grupo México), ubicada en la Cd de Cananea, Sonora, México, fueron derramados sobre la Cuenca del río Sonora, afectando a...

Within the context of major changes in economics, population distribution, and lifestyles around the world, people continue to rely on personal relationships for support. People also often create or find themselves in relationships that are alternatively asymmetrical or balanced. In this study, we are interested in how people face acute or chronic...

Each year, more than 30 million people worldwide are displaced by disaster, development, and conflict. The sheer magnitude of displacement points to a need for wider application of social science theories and methodologies to the special problems posed by these crises. We are convinced that social network analysis of the structure and development o...

Each year, more than 30 million people worldwide are displaced by disaster, development, and conflict. The sheer magnitude of displacement points to a need for wider application of social science theories and methodologies to the special problems posed by these crises. We are convinced that social network analysis of the structure and development o...

Research on disaster recovery emphasizes the ability of individuals and communities to avoid the disintegration of social institutions. Part of this resource loss—including access to services—owes to the deterioration of social support post-disaster. In this paper, we consider a group of parents and caretakers affected by the trauma of a fire that...

In 2009 a fire destroyed a day care center in Mexico, killing 49 children and leaving 100 others with serious injuries. This chapter explores how suffering and the search for justice and closure have produced a social movement of interconnected subgroups of parents and caretakers. These new social groups collaborate and at times compete due to thei...

The devastating eruptions of Mount Tungurahua in the Ecuadorian highlands in 1999 and 2006 left many communities struggling to rebuild their homes and others permanently displaced to settlements built by state and nongovernmental organizations. For several years afterward, households diversified their economic strategies to compensate for losses, c...

Women are frequently considered more vulnerable and generally experience higher levels of stress than do men in disaster environments. This is due in minor part to biological differences between men and women (e.g., pregnancy, nursing, physical strength, various hormone levels, differences in daily caloric intake strategies/metabolism), but is due...

A social network framework was used to examine how vulnerability and sustainability forces affect community resilience through exposure, evacuation and resettlement. Field work, undertaken in volcanically active areas in Ecuador and Mexico, involved structured questionnaires and ethnographic studies of residents and their social networks, and inter...

Although virtually all comparative research about risk perception focuses on which hazards are of concern to people in different culture groups, much can be gained by focusing on predictors of levels of risk perception in various countries and places. In this case, we examine standard and novel predictors of risk perception in seven sites among com...

Although virtually all comparative research about risk perception focuses on which hazards are of concern to people in different countries—regardless of whether they have directly experienced a hazard or disaster or not—much can be gained by focusing on predictors of the level of concern in particular countries and places. The comparative approach...

Amateur astronomers play a critical role engaging the general public in astronomy. The role of individual and club-related factors is explored using data from two surveys (Survey 1 N ¼ 1142; Survey 2 N ¼ 1242) of amateur astronomers. Analysis suggests that formal or informal training in astronomy, age, club membership, length of club membership, an...

In 2009, Witsenburg and Adano summarized their research on rainfall variability and livestock raiding in Marsabit District, Kenya. They found that livestock-related violence was higher in wetter months and wetter years, contrary to the common assumption that scarcity of water and pasture is the primary driver of livestock violence. Our research, fo...

Astronomy clubs constitute a “marching army” of knowledgeable and experienced astronomy enthusiasts deployed in a national network: an enormously valuable and important resource for engaging the public through educational outreach events and activities. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) in partnership with the Institute for Learning Inn...

Traditional education and public outreach (EPO) by amateur astronomers is dominated by "star parties," which are public night sky or solar viewing events in which amateur astronomers allow the public (or school children) to observe astronomical objects through telescopes and interpret for them "the wonders of the heavens." Amateur astronomers are e...

In a previous study, Ember and associates (2012) found that livestock-related violence involving the Turkana was higher in dry months, drier years, and when months were drier than expected between the years of 1998–2009. This article has data on livestock-related violence from media reports, together with localized and georeferenced spatial and rai...

This study examines the correlates of human relations experiences and social engagement practices of immigrants, U.S. minorities, and Whites in Greensboro, North Carolina. As part of a 2008 State of Human Relations study commissioned by the City of Greensboro, we examined residents' experiences with prejudice, (i.e., ignorance, fear, distrust, supe...

This study examined grief and mental health service use among 86 bereaved caregivers of advanced cancer patients. Caregivers were assessed before (median=3.1 months) and after (median=6.6 months) patients' deaths for prolonged grief disorder, axis I psychiatric disorders, mental health service use, suicidality, and health-related quality of life. S...

Disasters highlight the vulnerability of people who have limited access to resources. However, based on research from Mexico, we seek-in the context of disasters-to qualify the generalization that mental health is associated with social inequality and individual socioeconomic status. We collected data on socioeconomic status, social support, and de...

The relationship between human communities and the environment is extremely complex. In order to resolve the issues involved with this relationship, interdisciplinary research combining natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities is necessary. In this 2010 book, specialists summarise methods and research strategies for various aspects of soci...

Keywords: natural hazard, social network, evacuation, resettlement, disaster, ecology and environment

The authors address the issues faced while collecting survey data as part of a large multisite, multidisciplinary long-term project using interviewers rather than self-administered questionnaires in a country in which the researchers are not native. The issues pertain to the collection of high-quality data that accurately measure the variables of i...

Many spatial social networks have the property that nearby nodes are more likely to be connected than are nodes that are farther apart. We develop a characteristic of spatial graphs that captures whether shorter distance ties are preferred over longer distance ties, and the degree to which this edge length bias occurs. This allows us to estimate wh...

The present study examined the effect of childhood trauma on adulthood physical health among a randomly selected sample of adults (N = 2,177) in urban Mexico. Adults were interviewed about their experiences of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and physical health symptoms using Module K of the Composite International Diagnostic In...

Interpersonal trust is one possible mechanism by which wealth inequality affects the success of efforts in cooperation. Specifically, the presence of perceived economic differences between members of small agricultural cooperatives in northwest Ecuador's agricultural frontier encourages trust in the wealthy, thus facilitating co-op development duri...

"This paper explores some of the remarkable properties that set human ecosystems apart from nonhuman ecosystems. The identification of these properties provides a framework for bridging the theoretical and methodological divide between biological ecology and human ecology. The unique information-processing capability of humans in ecosystems is cent...

Does a village's location in a regional economic system predict the extent to which close interpersonal relationships are based on socioeconomic similarity? A comparison of sample social networks of four frontier villages in northwest Ecuador showed that village centrality influences the dominant types of social relationships and, thus, the differe...

The historical development of military organization in the United States has been strongly influenced by the desire to make more precise information available to decision-makers at appropriate levels in the chain of command for national security and warfare. By placing the U.S. military in national and international contexts, this paper proposes th...

Agricultural cooperatives in Ecuador have experienced varied levels of success as well as increased difficulty staying together in the past 20 years. In addition, a trend towards greater concentration of landholdings and corresponding increases in inequality erodes land reform's positive impact on the equitable distribution of land, albeit limited....