Social Network Ideas, Individual Level Data

This brief video contrasts the rich social network theory in Ross and Wu's 1995 American Sociological Review article, "The Links between Education and Health." Ross and Wu do a stellar job of expanding thinking about health beyond the biologically-centered focus on the physical body, adding social dimensions related to job quality, control over one's life, and social support. In that last dimension, however, Ross and Wu describe ideas about embeddedness in a network, while actually measuring only psychological feelings about vague ideas of support. That measurement was in many ways necessitated by the choice to work with individual-level data and the consequent limits to the possibility of integrating actual network measures. What health effects would Ross and Wu have found if they had been able to explicitly measure the social networks surrounding individuals?