Social network structure in a recovery housing agency: influence of multiple houses

Recovery housing can help people build supportive social networks that play a key role in recovery from substance use disorder. While there has been research on the social networks that form in individual houses, there has been no social network analysis of such an agency with multiple houses. In this study we gave a social network survey three times over eight months to the residents of a recovery housing agency for women that included six recovery houses. We find that these networks include multiple dense communities, characterized by network reciprocity and transitivity, connected by sparse links between communities. Some of the clusters include multiple houses. This is known as a small network structure. Dense social networks offer social support and encourage accountability to peers, while ties between clusters allow for information flow between multiple groups. The network structure of this agency shows that recovery housing can offer both.