Social Network Relationships And Health Of The Elderly

Aging of population has become an important social problem, how to effectively protect and improve the health of the elderly people has been the concern of more and more researchers. Most researches showed that social network relationships were essential to the health of the elderly, especially in the promotion of social network type and social relations quality. More social relations, diversified the sources and high quality of social relations means the better health of elderly. In China, family relationship is the core of the social relationship of the elderly, and has a significant effect on health, But with the economic development and social structure changes, the importance of non-kinship is rising, which may makes a more beneficial effect on specific health outcome than family relationship. Indeed, the controversies about social network type and quality of social relations are mainly concentrated in the relative impacts of the family network type and friends network type, the quality of family relationship and the quality of friendship. What’s more, few studies have explored the relative influence of social network type and social relations quality on the health of the elderly. Therefore, This study investigated the relationships between social network type and social relationship quality and health status of the elderly, and to compare their relative effects on different aspects of health.In this study, Activities of Daily Life(ADL), Instrumental Activities of Daily Life(IADL), UCLA Loneliness Scale(UCLA), Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale(CES-D), Positive Affect and Negative Affect(PANAS),Mini-Mental State Examination(MMSE), and a series of indicators of social network structure and quality of social relations were used to investigate 289 elderly people,which including 119 men and 170 women. After analyzing the survey results, the following conclusions:1. Social network type has a significant impact on the health of the elderly, and the role of different types of social network on health status is different. Respondents embedded in diverse network type tended to exhibit greatest health status in terms of higher rating of health, less loneliness, less depression symptoms, greater emotion well-being, and better cognition ability. However, the impact of restricted network type is least.2. For the comparison of family network type and friends network type, the friends network type is more beneficial than the family network type in physical health but not in mental health.3. To the source of positive and negative interaction, spouse or partner provided the most, followed by close relatives, and the least is friend relationship.4. The quality of family relations is associated with both physical and mental health, the romantic relationships quality and friendships quality are only associated with mental health. However, there is no significant relation between the quality of social relations and MMSE.5. For the comparison of family relation quality and friendships quality, though family relation quality has a diffuse effect on health of elderly, the effect of friend relationship quality on emotional well-being is greater than the quality of family relationship.6. The social network type and the quality of social relationship have different effects on different health aspects. The effect of social relationship quality on physical and mental health is greater than that of social network type, and the role of social network type on cognitive ability is greater than that of social relationship quality.