Measuring the Effects of Stress and Social Networks on the Health of Canadians

We analyze the impact of networks and stress on the general and mental health of men and women aged 25 to 59 using data from the Canadian 2008 General Social Survey on Social Networks. Controlling for demographic and other variables, we examine the effects on health of social network types (family vs. friends), size, strength (frequency of contact) and diversity, and the interaction of these network variables with stress. We largely find the expected health benefits of network size, strength and diversity. Nonetheless, we also find diminishing health returns at higher levels of the network measures. The general health of men and women, for example, benefits from increasing size of family network, but such benefit decreases after a certain size. Likewise, increases in friend and family network sizes have positive but diminishing returns on men’s mental health. As expected, stress negatively impacts the general and mental health of men and women but social networks can buffer some of the negative effects. The negative effect of stress on men’s mental health is lessened with a more diverse network. Similarly, the negative effect of stress on women’s mental health decreases with larger network of friends. However, in the case of general health, men with higher stress have worsening health if they are in more diverse networks.