Three Papers on Social Participation over the Life Course

Abstract

Social participation encapsulates the involvement and participation of individuals in social activities (e.g., informal social gatherings, affiliations to community organizations), and has long been a subject of interest for sociologists. Recent scholarship has since established a strong positive association between social participation and health, suggesting that social participation can buffer the negative health effects of stress and promote healthy behavior through social influence, among other pathways. There are however three key limitations of prior research. First, perhaps driven by anxieties around rising health costs of an aging population, studies on social participation and health overwhelmingly focus on older populations. Second, many are interested in examining societal change in social connectedness over time, but given the use of repeated cross-section data, are at risk of conflating age and cohort effects. Third, research often treats social participation solely as a characteristic of the individual, even though the social participation of proximate others may also affect one’s own outcomes – e.g., spouses may be influenced by their friends’ health behavior, and in turn influence their partners. We know very little about how social participation operates in the context of interdependent individuals such as spousal dyads. This dissertation addresses existing gaps in the literature by applying the life course perspective to the study of social participation and health. I do this through a series of papers that (1) examine how social participation varies over age and cohort; (2) establish how the association between social participation and health changes with age; and (3) investigate how social participation and health is associated in the context of marital dyads. The first paper uses data from the Americans’ Changing Lives (ACL) study, a longitudinal dataset collected from the same individuals over 25 years (1986-2011). I employ a Multivariate Bayesian generalized additive mixed model to estimate age-cohort trajectories of formal and informal social participation. I find that changes in social participation by age and cohort are less drastic than commonly assumed; older adults seem to compensate for age-graded declines in informal social participation by increasing their formal social participation. Any anxiety around societal declines in social connectedness precipitated by past studies is overblown – later-born cohorts seem to have similar (or greater) levels of social participation compared to older cohorts. In the second paper, I use data from ACL once again, employing growth curve models to estimate how the association between social participation and health changes with age. I find that formal social participation (e.g., attendance and engagement in community groups and organizations) becomes more important for males as they age – the negative association between formal social participation and depressive symptoms becomes stronger in old age. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, the final paper utilizes actor-partner interdependence models to examine social participation and mental health among married couples. I find evidence supporting the hypothesis that spousal social participation is positively associated with one’s own mental health (i.e., partner effects), even after accounting for interdependencies in mental health between spouses. Overall, the dissertation applies life course principles to provide a more comprehensive view of social participation and its associations with health outcomes. Findings suggest that social participation in late life should be considered alongside social participation earlier in the life course, and that the social participation of proximate others can also influence our own health outcomes.