Data for a personal network analysis of health-advice seeking and dietary influence in a rural community

Dataset and reproducibility materials for the article "A personal network analysis of health-advice seeking and dietary influence in a rural community". What the data are. Personal network data from the 4P-CAN panel study in a rural commune of Argeș County, Romania. Respondents (egos) were recruited by link-tracing from six seeds and, in waves 3 and 4, named the adults living in the community with whom they communicated daily or weekly. For each named contact (alter), they reported sociodemographic characteristics, the relationship (co-residence, kinship, contact frequency, closeness, shared meals), and two health-related relations: whether they turn to the contact for health advice and whether the contact has tried to change the way they eat. Across the four waves, 142 respondents gave 353 interviews and described 7,608 respondent-contact ties. The article analyses Wave 3 (89 respondents, 1,625 ties) and uses Wave 4 (87 respondents, 2,529 ties) for consistency checks and a 61-respondent panel. Files. ego_table.rds / ego_table.csv - one row per respondent and wave (353 rows, 45 variables): sex, age, education, household size, income band, cardiovascular condition, self-rated health, weight and BMI, diet, smoking, sport, who cooks in the household, and the frequency of consumption of eight processed-food categories. alter_table.rds / alter_table.csv - one row per respondent, named contact and wave (7,608 rows, 43 variables): the two outcome relations (health advice, attempted dietary influence), the contact’s characteristics as reported by the respondent, and the characteristics of the relationship. dataset_descriptor.pdf - definitions, coding and wave coverage of every variable, identifiers and naming conventions. supplementary_material.pdf - the complete R code and output of the article (data preparation, descriptive statistics, multilevel and penalised logistic regressions, exponential random graph models, Wave 4 re-estimations, panel models, diagnostics, all tables of the article and the supplementary tables, and the formal comparison of the two outcomes). The two data tables contain only the variables used by the analysis script. We removed names, contact details, and all other questionnaire items. Respondents and contacts carry arbitrary numeric identifiers. Namely, the same person keeps the same code across waves and networks, which allows contacts who were themselves interviewed to be linked to their own interview. Reproducing the analyses. Place ego_table.rds, alter_table.rds, code.R and supplementary_material.Rmd in one folder, install the packages listed in Section 0 of the supplementary material, and knit the .Rmd (R 4.4.2). Every estimate, table, and figure in the article is produced by a numbered section of the script. Figure 1, included in the article, was created for illustrative purposes using .visone. Ethics. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Center for Innovation in Medicine (INOMED), decisions D001/09-06-2023, D001/19-01-2024 and D002/03-02-2025. All participants gave informed consent. Funding. The personal network data collection process was supported by 4P-CAN project (HORIZON-MISS-2022-CANCER-01, project ID 101104432, programme HORIZON) and UEFISCDI (PN-IV-P8-8.1-PRE-HE-ORG-2023-0020). Related publications. Hâncean, M.-G., Geantă, M., Molina, J.-L., Mihăilă, B.-E., Vidraşcu, B.-A., Cioroboiu, C. and Lerner (2027) Returning network findings: An art gallery as a report-back in a rural community, Social Networks, 88, 21-31, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2026.08.005 Hâncean, M.-G., Lerner, J. and McCarty, C. (2026) Comparing name generator designs in panel personal network data, Field Methods, https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X261446429 Hâncean, M.-G., McCarty, C., Molina, J. L., Geantă, M., Lerner, J., Mihăilă, B.-E., Oană, I. and Cioroboiu, C. (2026) Adapting longitudinal personal network research through participation, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 25, https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069261456267 Hâncean, M.-G., Geantă, M., Molina, J. L., Lerner, J., Ghiță, M.-C., Mihăilă, B.-E., Vidrașcu, B.-A., and Cioroboiu, C. (2026). Four waves of cancer-related risk behaviour and personal network data from a rural Romanian community: dataset (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22935150 Hâncean, M.-G., Geantă, M., Mihăilă, B.-E., and Cioroboiu, C. (2025) Social clustering of health behaviors in rural Romania: a personal network analysis, Sociologie Românească, 23, 2, 43-56. https://doi.org/10.33788/sr.23.2.3 Geantă, M., Cioroboiu, C., Mihăilă, B., and Hâncean, G. (2025) ReThinking Cancer Prevention Through Participation: from 4P-CAN Rural Living Lab in Eastern Europe, European Journal of Public Health, 35, Supplement_4. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckaf161.784 Hâncean, M.-G., Lerner, J., Perc, M., Molina, J.L., Geantă, M., Oană, I., and Mihăilă, B.-E. (2025) Processed food intake assortativity in the personal networks of older adults. Scientific Reports, 15, 10459. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-94969-0 Mihăilă, B.-E., Hâncean, M.-G., Perc, M., Lerner, J., Oană, I., Geantă, M., Molina, J. L., and Cioroboiu, C. (2024). Cross-sectional personal network analysis of adult smoking in rural areas. Royal Society Open Science, 11, 11, 241459. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241459 Oană, I., Hâncean, M.-G., Perc, M., Lerner, J., Mihăilă, B.-E., Geantă, M., Molina, J.L., Tincă, I., and Espina, C. (2024)Online Media Use and COVID-19 Vaccination in Real-World Personal Networks: Quantitative Study, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 26, e58257. https://www.jmir.org/2024/1/e58257 How to cite this dataset. Hâncean, M.-G., Ghiță, M.-C., Perc, M., Geantă, M., Lerner, J. and Cioroboiu, C. (2026) Data for a personal network analysis of health-advice seeking and dietary influence in a rural community [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23807481.