Social Networks, Inequality and Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic
https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/advance-article/doi/10.1093/geronb/gbaa117/5881435
This resource, titled “Exacerbating Inequalities: Social Networks, Racial/Ethnic Disparities, and the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States,” discusses the disruption and contraction of adults’ social networks as consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers found that there is a strong association between strong social networks and physical and mental health outcomes. In times of crises, they found that marginalized groups are more disrupted by changes in their social networks. Throughout this pandemic, the social networks of marginalized groups evolved in response to the burden of disease and containment, ultimately worsening inequality due to two reasons: limited resources, and network loss. Because people maintain relationships with those of their demographics, minority groups are less likely to have access to resources during times of crises, and networks will contract faster due to higher susceptibility to disease. Ultimately, researchers concluded that social connection is one of the best predictors of resilience and that changes in social networks, particularly for minority groups, determined the magnitude of consequences from the COVID-19 pandemic.
This resource connects to our class discussion of social networks, local bridges, and social capital. Looking at social networks in response to the pandemic, one can see that as a network contracts, resources and information become more limited, as we saw in our lessons on friend circles and local bridges. Given a social network with edges between all nodes, people are generally limited to the resources within their circle and rarely know information or have access that their friends do not. For minority groups who have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, social networks with no local bridges can be problematic and perpetuate inequality. As the resource mentioned, homophily makes it so that people tend to stay within circles of people who have the same demographics as themselves, which implies that local bridges will be rare. In the case of a pandemic, a local bridge could lead to great social capital, particularly economic and cultural capital, since those resources outside of a minority social network could help with both physical and mental health during COVID-19. Additionally, the higher susceptibility to the virus of minority groups causes networks to shrink and become sparser, which further limits the strength of the network. It is interesting to look at social network changes as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it is a concept that can be a great indicator of resilience but is often not considered.