Social networks and demographic outcomes

Social learning and social influence (or social pressure) through interpersonal channels have been thought to play a major role a myriad of demographic phenomena including the acceptance and use of contraceptives, the pace of family building, morbidity, migration decisions and the use of medical services. The present study focuses role mother’s personal network on her health knowledge and care practices of under-five children using primary data collected 379 respondent of rural Odisha. Both quantitative and qualitative data collected will be used for the purpose of analysis. A summative knowledge index was developed using responses by mothers about different childhood illness and care practices. Results that the size of network is directly associated with age, autonomy and children ever born of women. Better educated network members are more likely to speak about modern medicine methods whereas aged and uneducated members mostly advice them about traditional ritual and culture. The qualitative data shows that mother-in-laws are the most influential persons for traditional rituals and herbal medicines. In each village, there are at least two persons other than health personals who help and advises for treatments.

The life in tribal communities, particularly in closed environment, largely depends on socio-cultural conditions. Most of the social and ritual activities in these communities revolve around worship of supernatural power. But, these people are forced to settle in the plain area in the alien culture due to construction of Sardar Sarovar Project with different communities. Hence, they have to change themselves for survival. The present paper tries to study the impact of resettlement on social life of the resettled community. The study reveals that there is high impact of resettlement on social and cultural life of the resettled families. The celebration of tradition festivals has decreased after resettlement. Further, the method of performing and celebration of cultural activities at community level have also undergone change.

This study employs data from southern Ghana to examine whether higher stocks of social capital through participation in civic groups matter in self-reported health and subjective assessment of household well-being. Drawing on Putnam's conceptualization of social capital, we compare social support, social control, direct participation in and reproductive health discussions within voluntary associations on self-rated health and household well-being. We find that social support and encouragement to use family planning significantly predict self-rated good health and household well-being, while social control and direct participation does not. Also, we detect that whereas social control is associated with the likelihood of reporting health problems within the last six months; direct participation in voluntary groups is significantly associated with reporting fewer health problems. We situate the findings in the broader context of the nuanced role social capital plays in health outcomes and discuss their implications for health promotion programs and public health policies in resource constrained settings.

The Internet has massively altered the global information flow in a given population. Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others, make it easy for people who are Deaf or hard of hearing population to communicate with the rest of the world. The effect of Internet use on social relationships is still a matter of intense debate. While there is a burgeoning literature on the role of ICT in the creation of new forms of social networks, dubbed on-line communities, much less attention has been paid to the complex set of relationships which are emerging between some off-line communities and the internet, and in particular to some of the new spatiality that is emerging as a result of community-based ICT practices. This paper develops this work by focusing on the social media networks (SMN) among Deaf Population and its demographic outcomes. The paper then goes on to explore how Deaf people are using the social media to communicate with each other and how the SMN and internet is contributing to the re-spatialisation and scaling-up of Deaf community, while having other unanticipated effects on mobility of Deaf population.

The proposed study is content analysis based research on bloggers with specific target respondents comprising of Post Graduate students pursuing Communication and Journalism Program in University of Mumbai, India. It studies how blogging causes transformation of digital knowledge in adult population. Blogs by and large connect to the community and bring about behavioral changes in human beings. The researcher wants to investigate how blogs can help open bloggers to views, sharing of experiences, behavior, solve problems, enhance articulation, and improve literacy bringing about, cultural-intellectual–philosophical and socio-psychological changes among the students. The respondents are belonging to diverse sections of Indian society and they are exposed to comprehensive thinking, clear vision and they form opinion based thinking. Students have voluntarily chosen an assignment to start and maintain the blogs out of ten parameters of internal assessment within the program. The methodology is quantitative and qualitative. The content analysis will be done on daily updates made by the respondents on their blogs. In-depth interviews of the respondents shall be taken to ascertain transformation in adulthood. This study is more contemporary and relevant in India, because young adult population has started digital migration.

People selectively reveal secrets to or withhold secrets from each other and this behavior affects listeners’ perceptions of the people with whom they interact. I examine secret-keeping and telling using the test cases of abortion and miscarriage in the United States. I exploit their demographic similarities and that they vary with regard to stigma; miscarriage being a near-random event is analytically fruitful. Through a unique survey representative of American adults, I document that abortion secrets are told to sympathetic people and kept from those who may react negatively to the information -- even within families. As such, though abortion is a more common event that affects more women, more Americans come into knowing contact with a woman who has had a miscarriage. Consequently, people with positive attitudes toward abortion hear these secrets and will hence perceive and experience a heterogeneous network whereas people with negative attitudes will not hear about the abortions of the women they know and hence perceive and experience a homogeneous network, even if they live within the same circles. If individuals effectively exist in networks tailored by others to not offend them then the social change predicted by contact with diverse individuals will be thwarted.

Japan, unlike most Western countries, has experienced limited movement in several components of the second demographic transition, including non-marital fertility, use of childcare centers, and, somewhat less so, cohabitation. Yet Japan has experienced many of the structural changes found in Western societies that are related to the second demographic transition, including increased education levels with the increases more marked for women than men, rise of the service economy, urbanization, shift to work settings not conducive to caring for young children, and out-sourcing of labor-intensive manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries. Using longitudinal and cross-sectional data that include information on knowing relatives, friends and co-workers who have engaged in non-traditional fertility and family behavior, this paper examines the extent to which knowing such people has changed over time and longitudinally over the life course. We also examine the extent to which knowing someone engaged in non-traditional behaviors is patterned by such structural variables as birth cohort, sex and education, as well as the connection between knowing someone who has engaged in non-traditional behavior and one’s attitudes toward such behaviors.

This study aimed to identify the components of social participation in Korean society and to examine the processes through which the components of social participation influence the degree of suicidal ideation people experience across age groups. Survey data from the 2010 Seoul Welfare Panel Study were used. the aggregate dataset was categorised into three groups by respondents’ ages. The groups were defined as ‘young adults’ (aged 20-39), ‘middle-aged adults’ (aged 40-64) and ‘the elderly’ (age 65 or more). Three dimensions of social participation were identified by factor analysis – friendship network & hobby group, religious involvement and instrumental social participation. In the young adult group, only instrumental participation was statistically significant (-0.10, p=0.06). In the middle-aged adult group, only friendship network & hobby group had a strong association with suicidal ideation (-0.11, p=0.01). Interestingly, for the elderly, religious involvement was related to suicidal ideation, but in a positive way (0.26, p=0.02). After further analysis, it was concluded that there was a strong association between depression and suicidal ideation among the elderly. The study results showed that different components of social participation are associated with a lower risk of suicidal ideation across age groups.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to develop a measurement model of social network, and to investigate the association of social network with socioeconomic and demographic variable.

Method: A sample of 600 older persons aged 60+ living in the 12 selected villages in rural Uttar Pradesh was recruited using Multi-stage random sampling.Social networks with children, relatives, friends and confidant were considered. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to test a multi-dimensional model of social networks.

Results: The results of the CFA demonstrated that the four specific social network types : children, relatives, friends and confidant proposed by Glass et al. were tenable. Large differences in specific social networks and total social networks by categories of age-group, marital status, educational attainment, working status, caste, wealth index and living arrangement were evident. Gender was not statistically significantly associated with any of the specific social network and total network.


Conclusion: Greater comparability between studies of older persons will be allowed with these proposed measures. The effect of the specific and total social network variables could lead to a better understanding of the effects of social networks upon health.

Suicide is not only linked to individuals’ psychological distress, but more fundamentally, it is a product of social and cultural conditions. Although previous research starting from Durkheim’s theory on solidarity generally suggests a negative association between social integration and suicide rates, few studies have explored the subject across different regions of the world. This study demonstrates how various social relationships are related to the prevalence of suicide differently by region. It uses multilevel regression models to analyze data from 42 countries that represent East Asia, Latin America, English-speaking countries, and Europe. The results show that East Europe has the highest suicide rates, followed by East Asia, North Europe, West Europe, North America, South Europe, and then Latin America. Although in general more integrated social relationships are associated with lower suicide rates, social relationships carry unequal weights in different regions. For example, marital dissolution predicts significantly higher suicide rates in East Asia and South Europe. Religious participation is linked to less suicide in Latin America but more suicide in East Asia and West Europe. The findings indicate that similar forms of social relationships may function dissimilarly in different cultural and institutional settings.