Journal Article
Biological costs and benefits of social relationships for men and women in adulthood: the role of partner, family and friends
Authors
Publication date
Jan 2022
Summary
Despite numerous studies on social relationships and health, the empirical focus has often been on middle-aged or older adults, even though young adulthood is a period of considerable change in social networks. We investigated whether the associations between social relationships and allostatic load, a multisystem physiological dysregulation index that reflects chronic stress responses, vary by type of relationship and stages of the lifecourse. Relationships with spouse/partner, immediate family and friends were assessed in terms of emotional support and social strain. Poisson regression models on multiple imputed data sets from waves 2–3 (2010–2012) of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (N = 10,380) were estimated. Social strain, particularly from partners and immediate family, appeared to elicit greater stress related dysregulation during early adulthood (age 21–34 years), corresponding to a predicted difference in the allostatic load index (range 0–12) between high and low strained relationships of 1.1 (95% CI: 0.5–1.6) among young women and 0.6 (95% CI: −0.04 to 1.2) among young men. There was little evidence of an association between allostatic load and any of the social relationships among older men and women. Models of social relationships over the lifecourse need to take account of how stressful social relationships become biologically embedded in early adulthood.
Published in
Sociology of Health & Illness
Volume and page numbers
44 , 5 -24
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13386
ISSN
16
Subjects
Social Networks, Young People, Health, Life Course Analysis, Sociology, Social Behaviour, Sociology Of Households, Social Psychology, and Biology
Links
University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library Periodicals *restricted to University of Essex registered users* - http://catalogue.essex.ac.uk/record=b1585532~S5
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