The Impact of Social Networks on Depression: Education Effect Focusing on Age and Gender Differences

Hyeyoung Woo, University of Texas at Austin

This study investigates the association of social networks and depression. Although many previous studies examined that social networks affected mental health negatively, there are not many studies to provide explanations from longitudinal perspectives. This study is mainly to explore what factors are related to social networks and affect the relationship between social networks and depression. Also, this study looks at this relationship by age and gender. I collected the data from three waves of American Changing Lives survey and multivariate regression models were mainly adopted. As the results, I found that social factors were closely related to formulate social networks and social networks affected depression negatively. I also found that education attainment had a positive effect on social networks and the effect became larger over time, while others did not. In addition, age and gender differences existed in social networks and depression as well as the relationship between two variables.