Developing Effective Community Network Analysis Tools According to Visualization Psychology

1 INTRODUCTION

Community network analysis is advancing in areas of sociology and geography, but largely undiscovered in the realm of health psychology. The outbreak of COVID-19 around the world highlights the critical roles that community networks can play in social and psychological health and wellbeing. Network visualization is an energetic subarea of visualization. It is an indispensable technology for supporting community network analysis, aiding psychologists in examining community organizational effects on wellbeing. Meanwhile, visualization psychology is a new branch of applied psychology, which aims to study the effects of visualization on different stakeholders in data intelligence workflows.

As illustrated, visualization psychology can, in return, aid visualization scientists to design better visualization tools for practitioners in all disciplines, particularly those in health psychology. In this paper, we reflect on the importance and potential impact of developing visualization psychology in the context of community network analysis.

2 COMMUNITYNETWORKANALYSIS: A DISCUSSION FROM THEPERSPECTIVE OF VISUALIZATIONPSYCHOLOGY

In community network analysis, based on graph theory, analytical algorithms are used to identify possible connections among individuals and different community groups. There are numerous data mining metrics for determining if two individuals are related and should be connected in a community network. These networks are typically depicted using node-link diagrams for disseminating the analytical results to the public or informing the relevant decision makers.

In healthcare and health psychology, such a data intelligence workflow can aid community healthcare professionals in monitoring and managing mental wellbeing in society, conducting various operations in epidemic management (e.g., contact tracing, risk assessment, and intervention planning), and evaluating and optimizing various theory-based and data-driven models.

While visualizing and exploring such analytically-constructed community networks can be very useful, there are many unanswered questions in visualization psychology. These questions may concern cognitive aspects like trust, spatial reasoning, working memory, visual search, motivation, and confidence.

In the context of epidemic management and community care management, effective visualization can advise the current state of social engagement of individual persons and improve cognitive effectiveness and efficiency in monitoring process. It can also enable individuals to observe their own social engagement, and be motivated by others who are in a similar situation.

3 CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion, it is highly desirable for medical and healthcare professionals to be able to use visualization as part of their data intelligence workflows. The benefits of visualization are evident in many other applications. On the other hand, the uses of visualization techniques in healthcare and health psychology can benefit from research in visualization psychology, which will facilitate the development of more effective and efficient visualization techniques.

While we should continue to develop new visualization tools for healthcare professionals, including health psychologists, we should make a serious effort to understand the cognitive benefits and shortcomings of using forms of visualization.

Health psychologists are thus at the center of the triangle of "health science", "visualization technology", and "visualization psychology", and can enable the two-way knowledge flow.