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Homophily, the tendency for similar actors to be connected at a higher rate than dissimilar actors, is a pervasive social fact. In this article, we examine changes over a 20-year period in two types of homophily—the actual level of contact between people in different social categories and the level of contact relative to chance. We use data from the 1985 and 2004 General Social Surveys to ask whether the strengths of five social distinctions—sex, race/ethnicity, religious affiliation, age, and education—changed over the past two decades in core discussion networks. Changes in the actual level of homophily are driven by the demographic composition of the United States. As the nation has become more diverse, cross-category contacts in race/ethnicity and religion have increased. After describing the raw homophily rates, we develop a case-control model to assess homophily relative to chance mixing. We find decreasing rates of homophily for gender but stability for race and age, although the young are increasingly isolated from older cohorts outside of the family. We also find some weak evidence for increasing educational and religious homophily. These relational trends may be explained by changes in demographic heterogeneity, institutional segregation, economic inequality, and symbolic boundaries.

Purpose To investigate social support and network features in people with first-episode psychosis, and to examine anxiety as a possible mediator between loneliness and a rating of paranoia. Method Thirty-eight people with first-episode psychosis were recruited for a cross-sectional study. Self-report questionnaires and structured interviews assessed symptoms, functioning, and qualitative social network and support features. A mood-induction task involved watching anxiety-inducing pictures on a computer screen. Visual analogue scales assessed changes in paranoia, anxiety and loneliness and a mediation analysis was conducted. Results One-third of the sample (34 %) had no confidant [95 % CI (18.4, 50.0 %)]. The average number of weekly contacts was 3.9, with 2.6 lonely days. Poor perceived social support, loneliness and the absence of a confidant were strongly associated with psychosis and depressive symptoms (0.35 <  r s < 0.60). The association between loneliness and paranoia was mediated through anxiety (ab = 0.43, z  = 3.5; p  < 0.001). Conclusions Even at first episode, a large proportion of people with psychosis have poor perceived support, no confidant and report several lonely days a week. Patients without a confidant appear to be more susceptible to feeling lonely and anxious. Anxiety may be one pathway through which loneliness affects psychosis. Interventions which focus on this are indicated.

Social anxiety lies on a continuum, and young adults with elevated symptoms are at risk for developing a range of psychiatric disorders. Yet relatively little is known about the factors that govern the hour-by-hour experience and expression of social anxiety in the real world. Here we used smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to intensively sample emotional experience across different social contexts in the daily lives of 228 young adults selectively recruited to represent a broad spectrum of social anxiety symptoms. Leveraging data from over 11 000 real-world assessments, our results highlight the central role of close friends, family members, and romantic partners. The presence of such close companions was associated with enhanced mood, yet socially anxious individuals had fewer confidants and spent less time with the close companions that they do have. Although higher levels of social anxiety were associated with a general worsening of mood, socially anxious individuals appear to derive larger benefits - lower levels of negative affect, anxiety, and depression - from their close companions. In contrast, variation in social anxiety was unrelated to the amount of time spent with strangers, co-workers, and acquaintances; and we uncovered no evidence of emotional hypersensitivity to these less-familiar individuals. These findings provide a framework for understanding the deleterious consequences of social anxiety in emerging adulthood and set the stage for developing improved intervention strategies.

This article explores the ways in which the intensification of parenting and the notion of children at risk have influenced grandmothers’ narratives and practices. Interviews with grandmothers who regularly look after their grandchildren, reveal that their practices are framed around the notions of children to be protected, educated and entertained. Such notions reveal that aspects of grandmothers’ roles as protectors, educators, playmates and confidants involved negotiations with parents around the ideal of ‘putting the child first’. The article argues that intensive parenting has influenced grandmothering but the way this is enacted reveals resistance to certain aspects of intensive parenting.

Background Caregivers are typically a mainstay of help with activities of daily living when older adults experience health concerns, but some caregivers also serve as confidants for discussing private matters. A burgeoning literature has revealed the health benefits of having at least one caregiver who also is a confidant. It remains unclear, however, who those caregivers are and how serving additional confidant roles is associated with their psychological well‐being. The current study addressed these gaps and, considering the unique experience of dementia caregiving, compared between dementia and nondementia caregivers. Method We used the 2017 survey data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study and the supplemental National Study of Caregiving. Participants included 2,652 caregivers (Mage = 61.61 years old; 916 dementia caregivers, 1,736 non‐dementia caregivers) of 1,697 older adults aged 65+ (i.e., care recipients). Care recipients nominated up to five confidants with whom they “talked most often about important things.” Caregivers reported their own demographic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, education, health, positive and negative relationship quality, relationship type) and psychological well‐being (e.g., feeling cheerful, calm, full of life). We conducted two‐level models as caregivers were nested within care recipients. Result Caregivers who were older, female, healthier, spouses or children, and reported more positive as well as more negative relationships with care recipients were more likely to be identified as confidants. Post‐hoc pairwise comparisons further revealed that spousal caregivers were mostly likely also confidants, followed by adult child caregivers, and then other types of caregivers. These associations remained the same for both dementia and nondementia caregivers. Caregivers who were confidants reported better psychological well‐being than those who were not, but this association varied by dementia caregiving status and was only evident among non‐dementia caregivers (see Figure 1). Conclusion This study extends prior work by revealing how serving multiple roles affects caregivers’ psychological well‐being and corroborating differences between dementia and nondementia caregiving. More research is needed to better understand the unique stressors dementia caregivers may be exposed to when serving as confidants for their care recipients, and interventions should be customized to allocate targeted resources to caregivers faced with different demands.

The current study assessed the burden associated with secret-keeping from confidants’ perspective. We proposed a cognition-affect-relationship model to explicate the interrelations between intra- and interpersonal consequences of confidants’ secret concealment. A total of 231 participants (M age = 32.6 years) completed a survey on their experiences in keeping secrets for a close relational partner. A path model was conducted to test all hypotheses simultaneously. Results indicated that secret importance, valence, and negative face threat served as indicators of cognitive burden regarding secret-keeping. As predicted, cognitive burden was positively associated with negative affect. In addition, negative affect mediated the association between cognitive burden and relationship satisfaction, whereas secret characteristics were directly related to relational distancing. Overall, examining confidant burden provides insights on how secret-keeping might affect individuals and their relationships.

ABSTRACTObjectivesThe present study examines how different lifelong employment patterns are related to social relationships in old age, and whether there are gender differences in the impact of lifelong employment patterns. Designs and participantsThe study was based on data collected among European adults as part of the Health, Aging and Retirement Survey in Europe (SHARE) and focuses on retired adults. MeasurementsThe study combines data on social relationships, collected in 2015, with retrospective data on employment history (number of jobs and years of employment) collected in 2017. ResultsThe findings show that adults who worked in more jobs had overall better structural characteristics of their later life networks – they had larger social networks and were more likely to include children and friends within those networks but less likely to include their spouse. On the other hand, working in more jobs was related to less emotional closeness with the network. These results varied between men and women; women who were involved in the labor market over their life had larger social networks and tended to include friends as confidants. Among men, working for more years was related to higher emotional closeness with the social network. ConclusionsThe study may indicate a gendered pattern of social advantages and disadvantages to involvement in the labor market over the work course. Practitioners should consider the lifelong employment of adults to identify those who might be at risk of social isolation.

Have the core discussion networks of Americans changed in the past two decades? In 1985, the General Social Survey (GSS) collected the first nationally representative data on the confidants with whom Americans discuss important matters. In the 2004 GSS the authors replicated those questions to assess social change in core network structures. Discussion networks are smaller in 2004 than in 1985. The number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled. The mean network size decreases by about a third (one confidant), from 2.94 in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. The modal respondent now reports having no confidant; the modal respondent in 1985 had three confidants. Both kin and non-kin confidants were lost in the past two decades, but the greater decrease of non-kin ties leads to more confidant networks centered on spouses and parents, with fewer contacts through voluntary associations and neighborhoods. Most people have densely interconnected confidants similar to them. Some changes reflect the changing demographics of the U.S. population. Educational heterogeneity of social ties has decreased, racial heterogeneity has increased. The data may overestimate the number of social isolates, but these shrinking networks reflect an important social change in America.

Previous research implies that the extent of welfare state regime provision plays an important indirect role in the prevalence of loneliness in later life. The aim of this study was therefore to assess the association between quality of living conditions and level of social integration indicators and the absence of loneliness in five different welfare regimes. By incorporating welfare state regimes as a proxy for societal-level features, we expanded the micro-level model of loneliness suggesting that besides individual characteristics, welfare state characteristics are also important protective factors against loneliness. The data source was from the European Social Survey round 7, 2014, from which we analysed 11,389 individuals aged 60 and over from 20 countries. The association between quality of living conditions, level of social integration variables and the absence of loneliness was analysed using multivariate logistic regression treating the welfare regime variable as a fixed effect. Our study revealed that the absence of loneliness was strongly associated with individual characteristics of older adults, including self-rated health, household size, feeling of safety, marital status, frequency of being social, as well as number of confidants. Further, the Nordic as well as Anglo-Saxon and Continental welfare regimes performed better than the Southern and Eastern regimes when it comes to the absence of loneliness. Our findings showed that different individual resources were connected to the absence of loneliness in the welfare regimes in different ways. We conclude that older people in the Nordic regime, characterised as a more socially enabling regime, are less dependent on individual resources for loneliness compared to regimes where loneliness is to a greater extent conditioned by family and other social ties.

Objective The authors examine whether racial and socioeconomic factors influence older adults' likelihood of experiencing instability in their social network ties with their adult children. Background Recent work shows that socially disadvantaged older adults' social networks are more unstable and exhibit higher rates of turnover, perhaps due to greater exposure to broader social–environmental instability. The authors consider whether this network instability applies to older adults' ties with their adult children, which are often among the closest and most valued social ties in later life. Methods The authors use two waves of data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (N = 1,456), a nationally representative, longitudinal study of older Americans. Through a series of multivariate regression models, the authors examine how race and education are associated with how frequently older adults reported being in contact with child network members, and how likely older adults were to stop naming their children as network members over time. Results African American and less educated individuals reported significantly more frequent contact with their adult child network members than did Whites and more educated individuals. Nevertheless, African American and less educated older adults were also more likely to stop naming their children as network confidants over time. Conclusion African American and less educated older adults may be at greater risk of losing access to the supports and other resources that are often provided by adult children, or of not being able to consistently draw on them as they age, despite the fact that these ties demonstrate greater potential for support exchange at baseline.