Core but not peripheral online social ties is a protective factor against depression: evidence from a nationally representative sample of young adults

TL;DR

It is found that – consistently with previous research – the number of online friends correlates with depression symptoms, but this is true only for networks that do not exceed Dunbar's number in size and only for core but not peripheral nodes of a friendship network.

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 <= 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.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: The distribution of the number of online friends. The median number of friends is 132, the majority of users (56%) have between 50 and 200 friends, however, some users have as many as 4,476 online friends.
• Figure 2: Different approaches to identifying the core friends. Core (red) and periphery (grey) nodes of an empirical ego network without the ego. Core friends include (a) all nodes of the network, (b) only the nodes in the largest connected component, (c) only the nodes in 3-core.
• Figure 3: The effect of network size on association between depressive symptoms and the size of network core. The distribution of the correlations between network core size (largest connected component) and depressive symptoms for smaller ($N \leq 150$) and larger ego networks ($N > 150$). The distributions are from $10,000$ bootstrap simulations.
• Figure 4: The relationship between the network size and depressive symptoms. The change in the strength of correlation between the number of friends and depression depending on the network size. For smaller networks, there is a consistent significantly negative correlation between the size of the network core and depressive symptoms but not for the size of the whole network. For larger networks, the correlation consistently does not differ from zero. The 90% confidence intervals are computed via bootstrap.