Conference Agenda

Social support has been shown to be an effective factor in improving women’s postnatal mental wellbeing. Medical sociologists unpack social support as informational support, emotional support, and tangible support (Lin et al., 1999). For the migrant population, seeking social support from digital spaces is popular because they lack adequate offline social networks to provide social support in host countries.

In order to understand migrant women’s experience of accessing social support in digital spaces and how the online social support affects their postnatal mental wellbeing, my project focuses on migrant Chinese mothers living in the UK as an example. Twenty semi-structured interviews and three focus groups were employed to collect data. My presentation will address the types of social support that emerged from the groups and show how social support affects migrant Chinese mothers’ postnatal mental wellbeing. Additionally, the research shows that migrant Chinese mothers prefer to seek peer support from other migrant Chinese mothers during the postnatal period. My presentation will outline what barriers they experienced when seeking peer support from the local population.

Current research on social support and health mainly focuses on using quantitative methods to evaluate the relationship between social support and health outcomes. However, different types of social support have various impacts. Therefore, this qualitative research further unpacks the different impacts that different social supports have on mothers’ postnatal mental well-being, and contributes to the concept of social support by exploring the lived experience from the perspective of migrant Chinese mothers.

Providing social support is one of the key roles of social networks. The COVID-19 pandemic put social networks under stress, providing a unique opportunity to study how the erosion of social contact impacts social support and how supportive relationships are rebuilt after social contact reinitiates. In particular, it raises the question of who was resilient to this impact and able to recover from it. In this work, we study the social support available to US residents since the beginning of the pandemic using 34 waves of a large-scale online survey with around 20,000 respondents per wave and viable samples across all 50 US states roughly every two months. We first describe the trends in social support available, finding a significant decrease during the pandemic and a slow posterior recovery. Then, we address the question of whether the pandemic increased the inequalities in access to social support or changed the role of protective factors. For this, we run cross-sectional regressions as well as panel analysis, focusing on the factors associated with recovering social support after the pandemic. Finally, we study the role of social distancing and online communication means. Our results show that non face to face communication played a major role and point to significant inequalities, such as by SES. We also find that social contact does not directly translate to social support availability: high social contact periods are not necessarily periods with high social support, and social distancing plays a minor role at the individual level.

Background: Physical activity (PA) is essential for older adults, reducing chronic disease risk, improving health, and enhancing quality of life. However, PA declines with age, and many older adults do not meet PA guidelines. Functional social support (SOSU) can help reduce PA barriers by providing emotional, instrumental, informational, companionship, and validation support.

Aim: Although evidence suggests a positive association between functional SOSU and PA, findings remain inconsistent. This study refines previous research by systematically reviewing and meta-analyzing how functional SOSU influences PA in older adults. It examines associations between SOSU types and PA measures, with subgroup analyses by age, region, SOSU measure, and PA type.

Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis according to PRISMA guidelines. The electronic databases APA PsycINFO, ProQuest, PSYINDEX, PubMed, Scopus, SocINDEX, and Web of Science were searched up to August 2023. English peer-reviewed studies focusing on community-dwelling older adults (mean age ≥60) were included. Study quality was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale, and outcome data were reported independently for each SOSU type.

Results: Of 20,907 abstracts screened, 43 studies met inclusion criteria for the systematic review, with most reporting a significant positive SOSU–PA association. For meta-analysis, studies measuring SOSU for PA and general SOSU were included. Analysis of 25 models showed a pooled effect size of β=0.13 for SOSU for PA and PA. The results suggest SOSU plays a key role in promoting PA, although heterogeneity and potential publication bias warrant further investigation. Random effects meta-regression will refine these findings.

Social influence can play an important role in explaining women’s contraceptive behaviors. There is limited evidence exploring whether social influence is occurring from exposure to alters using contraception, the perception that alters are using contraception, and/or beliefs that alters would be supportive of contraceptive use. To address this gap, we conducted a sociocentric network survey among all reproductive age women (ages 18-49; N=319) across eight villages in a rural parish in southwestern Uganda. We elicited their health network with a name generator and used name interpreter questions for data on ego’s perceptions of alters’ contraceptive use (women only) and whether ego thought alter would be supportive of ego using contraception. We gathered data on contraceptive-focused preference-aligned fertility practices, measured by (1) desire to use contraception and (2) current contraceptive use. Using multivariable logistic regression, we estimated individual and personal social network predictors of current contraceptive use and desired contraceptive use. We found that each additional alter believed to be supportive of contraceptive use was associated with significantly higher odds of egos using contraception, adjusting for ego age, education level, asset index, HIV-status, number of children, and intention to have more children (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 2.73, p-value<0.001). Having alters using contraception or perceived by ego to use contraception was not associated with ego’s contraceptive use. Our findings demonstrate that alters’ support for contraceptive use matters and suggests that interventions encouraging individuals to share their support for contraceptive use is more important than whether alters engage in those behaviors.

Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory disease that affects the joints, leading to pain and functional limitations. Patients with RA have higher rates of depression, which has been linked to worsened RA outcomes. However, there is a lack of research looking at patients’ social networks, and whether features of those networks are associated with depression and RA-attributable outcomes. Adults with RA symptoms (n = 69) in the Washington D.C. metro area completed a survey including measures of depressive symptoms and RA outcomes, along with personal network assessments. Participants with higher depression scores had more RA-attributable pain (b=0.013, p<0.01), more functional limitations in the categories of fine motor skills (b=0.12, p<0.01), mobility (b= 0.08, p<0.01), and body strength (b=0.04, p<0.01), and smaller personal networks (b=-0.03, p<0.01). Additionally, social network size modified the association of limitations in fine motor skills (b=-0.023, p<0.01) and mobility (b=-0.014, p<.01) with depressive symptoms. Future research aims to identify network mechanisms that improve quality of life for those diagnosed with RA. Initial findings suggest a need to identify ways to enhance or build personal networks to support people with RA.

Network analysis has historically focused on the aspects which directly affect the form and function of a social network of social relationships between people. However, this approach ignores the larger context in which these networks exist (e.g., physical environment). Harnessing additional information from non-network methods could improve our understanding of the way social networks are formed by its larger context, and the factors most important in the process. In the CONNECTION project we utilize collected large scale observational cohort data and population census data from various sources, to assess context factors in social network formation. Data in the following categories has been included; the local level of urbanization and green spaces, nearness to various amenities that could facilitate social interaction, socio-economic data, as well as information on the individual’s health status. Our contributions in this article are two-fold. First, we investigate if patterns can be observed in the data which may help us better understand how social networks are shaped by its wider context. We envision that a better understanding of this process will eventually translate into concrete policy steps that can help shape the larger context to support stronger social networks. Second, we investigate the potential Bayesian networks have in modelling the factors of influence. Bayesian networks are highly interpretable and can incorporate existing expert knowledge. Preliminary results show these aspects are of significant value when studying the different layers of the larger system that shapes social networks.