The co-evolution of emotional well-being with weak and strong friendship ties

TL;DR

This study explores how social ties and emotional well-being influence each other, revealing that well-being affects friendship selection and homophily in strong ties, using advanced network modeling on longitudinal data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel extension of ordered SAOMs to analyze weak and strong friendship ties simultaneously, highlighting the role of well-being in social selection processes.

Findings

Higher well-being predicts more strong-tied friendships

Homophily in emotional well-being exists in strong-tied networks

No support found for social integration and influence hypotheses

Abstract

Social ties are strongly related to well-being. But what characterizes this relationship? This study investigates social mechanisms explaining how social ties affect well-being through social integration and social influence, and how well-being affects social ties through social selection. We hypothesize that highly integrated individuals - those with more extensive and dense friendship networks - report higher emotional well-being than others. Moreover, emotional well-being should be influenced by the well-being of close friends. Finally, well-being should affect friendship selection when individuals prefer others with higher levels of well-being, and others whose well-being is similar to theirs. We test our hypotheses using longitudinal social network and well-being data of 117 individuals living in a graduate housing community. The application of a novel extension of Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models for ordered networks (ordered SAOMs) allows us to detail and test our hypotheses for weak- and strong-tied friendship networks simultaneously. Results do not support our social integration and social influence hypotheses but provide evidence for selection: individuals with higher emotional well-being tend to have more strong-tied friends, and there are homophily processes regarding emotional well-being in strong-tied networks. Our study highlights the two-directional relationship between social ties and well-being, and demonstrates the importance of considering different tie strengths for various social processes.