The positive effects of engaging in conversation with a broad range of people such as a spouse, friend, neighbor, a fellow member of a community group, or work colleague on a regular basis are discussed in this article. It is thought that the positive effects of social integration are due "social pressure by the network to stay healthy and by greater responsibility of socially integrated people to others". This research is based on what is a pretty poor measure of ones social network (i.e. endorsing a yes/no response to engaging in conversation with a set list of categories of people at least once every two weeks). I think moving beyond scale measures of social support (e.g. receive a little, a lot of support etc.) to measures which actually record the frequency and content of interaction will allow a marked advance in the study of social networks. Measures such as well-being, drinking and smoking could be administered via social network sites such as bebo and facebook which contain a wealth of information in regard to the way in which people are related (e.g. as friends, family, in a relationship etc) and using this information combined with frequency of interaction, content analysis for emotional references and social network analysis on a large sample would produce the best data currently available in this regard.
Why Would Social Networks Be Linked to Affect and Health Practices?
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The idea of using social networking websites to gather data reminded me of an old post I made way back a few months ago. You've seen it already Michael but I thought it would be good to flag it again. See below:
What Can Web Browsing and Social Networking tell us?
New research conducted by Microsoft is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. See story here.
Skeptics of the validity of the research should note that experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy!
The approach taken by Microsoft doesn't sound a million miles away from propensity score matching, and it opens up new possibilities for doing work with anonymised web browsing history, if such data could be made available through a Freedom of Information request.
The team at Microsoft say they expect to be able to "refine the profiles which contain bogus demographic information", and one day predict our occupations, and our levels of qualifications.
Another similar endeavour in this cyber-data approach is being conducted by the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking. They are funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks, such as MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Ringo and Facebook.
See more on this story here.
They are even considering the harnessing of advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" (championed by the web standards organisation W3C) - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.
Talk about an empirical economist's dream data!
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