Despite the rapid growth of the older never-married adult population, they remain underexplored—both as a distinct group and in comparison to their ever-married peers. Whether social integration mitigates or exacerbates disparities between older never- and ever-married adults remains unexamined. We integrate two competing theoretical frameworks—social precarity (or risk) versus social premium (or resilience) and social exacerbation versus social compensation—to investigate the relationship between lifelong singlehood and health, as well as the moderating role of social integration. Using longitudinal, nationally representative data from the Health and Retirement Study, our findings largely support the social precarity and social compensation models. Older never-married adults experience lower levels of social integration compared to their ever-married peers. However, their health benefits more from social integration than that of ever-married peers, suggesting that social connections play a particularly crucial role in mitigating health disparities for lifelong single adults.

The goal of the project is to identify key patterns of relationships that best predict strong social support and positive emotional well-being and thriving for Black and Indigenous college students. Using a quantitative critical and social network analysis approach (QuantCritSNA), this project consists of a mixed methods secondary data analysis on the (n=300) supportive people and spaces of 22 college students, collected at one large public land grant university in the Midwestern United States, to address the following aims: 1) Identify specific social network characteristics and compositions that best predict strong well-being support, accounting for effects due to the students (egos), whom they turn to for support (alters), the type of support offered, and contextual variables such as location of support; and 2) determine the processes involved in the creation and maintenance of strong well-being support both on and off campus. Employing a mixed methods social network analysis (Dominik et al., 2020) allows for the testing of social and relational mechanisms that support college student well-being, combined with the narrative evidence of the process of well-being support, ultimately building an evidence-based intervention development foundation, which as a necessary precursor to network intervention research and implementation. As such, this research will fill a research gap by identifying network mechanisms to provide greater evidence of associations between social networks, social support, and college student emotional well-being, which can guide institutional practice and policy that targets specific institutional resources and interactions that promote equitable well-being for all.