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Core But Not Peripheral Online Social Ties is a Protective Factor Against Depression: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Sample of Young Adults

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Network Science (NetSci-X 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 13197))

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Abstract

As social interactions are increasingly taking place in the digital environment, online friendship and its effects on various life outcomes from health to happiness attract growing research attention. In most studies, online ties are treated as representing a single type of relationship. However, our online friendship networks are not homogeneous and could include close connections, e.g. a partner, as well as people we have never met in person. In this paper, we investigate the potentially differential effects of online friendship ties on mental health. Using data from a Russian panel study (\(N = 4,400\)), we find that - consistently with previous research - the number of online friends correlates with depression symptoms. However, this is true only for networks that do not exceed Dunbar’s number in size (\(N \le 150\)) and only for core but not peripheral nodes of a friendship network. The findings suggest that online friendship could encode different types of social relationships that should be treated separately while investigating the association between online social integration and life outcomes, in particular well-being or mental health.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project number 19-18-00271).

The data of the Russian panel study “Trajectories in Education and Career” (TrEC http://trec.hse.ru/) is presented in this work. The TrEC project is supported by the Basic Research Programme of the National Research University Higher School of Economics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Education, HSE University, Moscow, Russia

    Sofia Dokuka, Elizaveta Sivak & Ivan Smirnov

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  1. Sofia Dokuka
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  2. Elizaveta Sivak
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Correspondence to Sofia Dokuka .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Pedro Ribeiro

  2. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Fernando Silva

  3. University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    José Fernando Mendes

  4. Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Rosário Laureano

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Dokuka, S., Sivak, E., Smirnov, I. (2022). Core But Not Peripheral Online Social Ties is a Protective Factor Against Depression: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Sample of Young Adults. In: Ribeiro, P., Silva, F., Mendes, J.F., Laureano, R. (eds) Network Science. NetSci-X 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13197. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97240-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97240-0_4

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