Community-based physical activity programs, such as the Recreovía, are effective in promoting healthy behaviors in Latin America. To understand Recreovías’ challenges and scalability, we characterized its social network longitudinally while studying its participants’ social cohesion and interactions. First, we constructed the Main network of the program’s Facebook profile in 2013 to determine the main stakeholders and communities of participants. Second, we studied the Temporal network growth of the Facebook profiles of three Recreovía locations from 2008 to 2016. We implemented a Time Windows in Networks algorithm to determine observation periods and a scaling model of cities’ growth to measure social cohesion over time. Our results show physical activity instructors as the main stakeholders (20.84% nodes of the network). As emerging cohesion, we found: (1) incremental growth of Facebook users (43–272 nodes), friendships (55–2565 edges), clustering coefficient (0.19–0.21), and density (0.04–0.07); (2) no preferential attachment behavior; and (3) a social cohesion super-linear growth with 1.73 new friendships per joined user. Our results underscore the physical activity instructors’ influence and the emergent cohesion in innovation periods as a co-benefit of the program. This analysis associates the social and healthy behavior dimensions of a program occurring in natural environments under a systemic approach.

中文翻译：

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基于社区的体育活动计划产生的社会凝聚力：时间网络分析


Recreovía 等基于社区的体育活动项目可有效促进拉丁美洲的健康行为。为了了解 Recreovías 的挑战和可扩展性，我们纵向描述了其社交网络，同时研究了其参与者的社会凝聚力和互动。首先，我们在 2013 年构建了该计划 Facebook 个人资料的主网络，以确定主要的利益相关者和参与者社区。其次，我们研究了 2008 年至 2016 年三个 Recreovía 地点的 Facebook 个人资料的时间网络增长。我们实施了网络算法中的时间窗口来确定观察期，并实施了城市增长的缩放模型来衡量随时间变化的社会凝聚力。我们的结果显示体育活动教练是主要的利益相关者（网络的 20.84% 节点）。作为新兴的凝聚力，我们发现：（1）Facebook 用户（43-272 个节点）、友谊（55-2565 个边）、聚类系数（0.19-0.21）和密度（0.04-0.07）的增量增长； （二）无优先依恋行为； (3) 社交凝聚力超线性增长，每个加入的用户新增 1.73 个好友。我们的结果强调了体育活动教练的影响力和创新时期的新兴凝聚力作为该计划的共同效益。该分析采用系统方法将自然环境中发生的项目的社会和健康行为维度联系起来。