The paper demonstrates a procedure for generalising hypotheses from evidence based modelling. Starting from an empirical agent based social simulation model of the village of Ga-Selala in South Africa, a more abstract and more general implementation of the model is implemented and run to assess a hypothesis about the process of breakdown of social support networks as a result of HIV/AIDS. The empirical model is already well validated. The abstract model is shown to yield similar results and to lead towards a more general theory of the social impact of epidemics such as HIV/AIDS.
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