Social Networks and Health Inequalities: A New Perspective for Research

Abstract

Abstract“Tell me how much your friends earn and I’ll tell you whether you smoke, what diseases you have and how old you’re going to become!” Part of this statement should be familiar to those who are interested in the connection between social inequality and health. People of comparatively lower socioeconomic status are at higher risk of health problems and are more likely to fall ill and die earlier than those who have a higher income etc. However, the sentence does not ask about your own income, but about the income of your friends. Is this information really meaningful? Does it really make a difference to your own health which friends you have, who you surround yourself with in your everyday life and what social position these people have?

Social network shrinking is explained by active and passive effects but not increasing selectivity with age in wild macaques

“…Although frailty and declining motivation may contribute to decreasing social engagement with age, prevailing socioemotional selectivity theories of ageing tend to emphasize increasing selectivity in partner choice as a driver of age-related network narrowing [ 4 – 6 , 56 ]. According to socioemotional selectivity theories, among humans changes in network composition and size result from greater priority given to maintaining emotionally positive relationships over acquiring new information, leading subjects to discard less valued relationships.…”

“…One of the keys to healthy ageing may lie in the positive influence of strong social integration on health [ 2 , 3 ]. Concerns therefore arise from research showing that people reduce the size of their social network and their level of social engagement with age [ 4 ]. The causes and consequences of this reduction in social engagement are still actively debated [ 2 , 4 ].…”

“…Several causal models for reduced social engagement are anchored in the framework of age-related losses (e.g. activity and social exchange theories, reviewed in [ 4 ]). Accordingly, individuals experiencing frailty, sickness or loss of social value with age are unable to maintain their social engagement owing to physiological constraints, exclusion by younger generations or diminished self-perception.…”

A blueprint for a new commercial driving epidemiology: An emerging paradigm grounded in integrative exposome and network epistemologies

“…While delineating the architecture of ordinary graphs—exemplified by pairwise node interactions represented by edges—has generated valuable insights in understanding and preventing health and safety risks, 101–103 it also comes with inherent constraints 104 . Like other complex networks (e.g., neural or metabolic systems), the multifactorial and multilayered nodes of this CANoN (i.e., the complex network of commercial drivers' health and safety risks) are anticipated to interact in larger groups and such interactions cannot be decomposed as linear combinations of dyadic couplings 105 .…”

Social inequality, social networks, and health: a scoping review of research on health inequalities from a social network perspective

“…From a theoretical point of view, the social network perspective has been identified as having the potential to improve our understanding of health inequalities [ 23 ]. This perspective may be particularly valuable when it focuses on the structures and the mechanisms that influence health outcomes, while also analysing how individual differences are multiplied by social networks, and how social inequalities are reproduced.…”