Background 
The quality and quantity of individuals' social relationships has been linked not only to mental health but also to both morbidity and mortality.
Objectives 
This meta-analytic review was conducted to determine the extent to which social relationships influence risk for mortality, which aspects of social relationships are most highly predictive, and which factors may moderate the risk.
Data Extraction 
Data were extracted on several participant characteristics, including cause of mortality, initial health status, and pre-existing health conditions, as well as on study characteristics, including length of follow-up and type of assessment of social relationships.
Results 
Across 148 studies (308,849 participants), the random effects weighted average effect size was OR = 1.50 (95% CI 1.42 to 1.59), indicating a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow-up period. Significant differences were found across the type of social measurement evaluated (p<0.001); the association was strongest for complex measures of social integration (OR = 1.91; 95% CI 1.63 to 2.23) and lowest for binary indicators of residential status (living alone versus with others) (OR = 1.19; 95% CI 0.99 to 1.44).
Conclusions 
The influence of social relationships on risk for mortality is comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality.

Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary

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Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review

Peter Berger (1929) is an American sociologist best known for his collaboration with Thomas Luckman in writing The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. That book argues that human reality, and knowledge of it, is a social construct, emerging from the individual or group’s interaction with larger social structures (institutions). Social structures, once widely adopted, lose their history as social constructions (objectivation), and come over time, by the people who live within them, to be deemed natural realities independent of human construction (reification). Berger predicted, in his later book, The Sacred Canopy, near-term all-encompassing secularization of religion, which prediction has proved false, especially in the third world (as Berger himself has acknowledged in his later work, Desecularization).

神圣的帷幕 : 宗教社会学理论之要素 = The sacred canopy elements of a sociological theory of religion

Social relationships—both quantity and quality—affect mental health, health behavior, physical health, and mortality risk. Sociologists have played a central role in establishing the link between social relationships and health outcomes, identifying explanations for this link, and discovering social variation (e.g., by gender and race) at the population level. Studies show that social relationships have short- and long-term effects on health, for better and for worse, and that these effects emerge in childhood and cascade throughout life to foster cumulative advantage or disadvantage in health. This article describes key research themes in the study of social relationships and health, and it highlights policy implications suggested by this research.

/pdf/social-relationships-and-health-a-flashpoint-for-health-5acz10lskr.pdf

Social Relationships and Health: A Flashpoint for Health Policy

Current research on prosocial behavior covers a broad and diverse range of phenomena. We argue that this large research literature can be best organized and understood from a multilevel perspective. We identify three levels of analysis of prosocial behavior: (a) the “meso” level—the study of helper-recipient dyads in the context of a specific situation; (b) the micro level—the study of the origins of prosocial tendencies and the sources of variation in these tendencies; and (c) the macro level—the study of prosocial actions that occur within the context of groups and large organizations. We present research at each level and discuss similarities and differences across levels. Finally, we consider ways in which theory and research at these three levels of analysis might be combined in future intra- and interdisciplinary research on prosocial behavior.

https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc591Readings/PennerDovidioPiliavinSchroeder2005.pdf

Prosocial Behavior: Multilevel Perspectives

Using two waves of panel data from Americans' Changing Lives (House 1995) (N = 2,681), we examine the relationships between volunteer work in the community and six aspects of personal well-being: happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem, sense of control over life, physical health, and depression. Prior research has more often examined the effects of voluntary memberships than of volunteer work, has used cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data, and, when longitudinal, has emphasized social causation over selection effects. Focusing only on the consequences of volunteer work overlooks the antecedents of human agency. People with greater personality resources and better physical and mental health should be more likely to seek (or to be sought for) community service. Hence, we examine both selection and social causation effects. Results show that volunteer work indeed enhances all six aspects of well-being and, conversely, people who have greater well-being invest more hours in volunteer service. Given this, further understanding of self- versus social-selection processes seems an important next step. Do positive, healthy people actively seek out volunteer opportunities, or do organizations actively recruit individuals of these types (or both)? Explaining how positive consequences flow from volunteer service may offer a useful counterpoint to stress theory, which has focused primarily on negative life experiences and their sequelae.

/pdf/volunteer-work-and-well-being-1ljmydvexu.pdf

Volunteer work and well-being.

The authors construct an integrated theory of formal and informal volunteer work based on the premises that volunteer work is (1) productive work that requires human capital, (2) collective behavior that requires social capital, and (3) ethically guided work that requires cultural capital. Using education, income and functional health to measure human capital, number of children in the household and informal social interaction to measure social capital, and religiosity to measure cultural capital, they estimate a model in which formal volunteering and informal helping are reciprocally related but connected in different ways to different forms of capital. Using two-wave data from the Americans' Changing Lives panel study, they find that formal volunteering is positively related to human capital, number of children in the household, informal social interaction and religiosity. Informal helping, such as helping a neighbor, is primarily determined by gender, age and health. Estimation of reciprocal effects reveals that formal volunteering has a positive effect on helping, but helping does not affect formal volunteering

/pdf/who-cares-toward-an-integrated-theory-of-volunteer-work-4689a66gau.pdf

Who cares? Toward an integrated theory of volunteer work

Volunteering and depression: the role of psychological and social resources in different age groups.

Preface Acknowledgments Part 1. An Introduction to Volunteering 1. The Importance of Studying Volunteering 2. What Is Volunteering? Part 2. Subjective Dispositions 3. Personality 4. Motives 5. Values, Norms, and Attitudes Part 3. Individual Resources 6. Socio-Economic Resources 7. Time and Health 8. Gender 9. Race Part 4. The Social Context of Volunteering 10. The Life Course: The Early Stages 11. The Life Course: The Later Stages 12. Social Resources 13. Volunteer Recruitment 14. Schools and Congregations 15. Community, Neighborhood, City, and Region 16. Cross-National Differences 17. Trends in Volunteering Part 5. The Organization of Volunteer Work 18. Volunteer Tasks 19. The Volunteer Role Part 6. The Consequences of Volunteering 20. Citizenship and Prosocial Behavior 21. Occupation, Income, and Health 22. Conclusion Appendix Notes References Index

Volunteers: A Social Profile

Progress in studying the relationship between religion and health has been hampered by the absence of an adequate measure of religiousness and spirituality. This article reports on the conceptual and empirical development of an instrument to measure religiousness and spirituality, intended explicitly for studies of health. It is multidimensional to allow investigation of multiple possible mechanisms of effect, brief enough to be included in clinical or epidemiological surveys, inclusive of both traditional religiousness and noninstitutionally based spirituality, and appropriate for diverse Judeo-Christian populations. The measure may be particularly useful for studies of health in elderly populations in which religious involvement is higher. The measure was tested in the nationally representative 1998 General Social Survey (N = 1,445). Nine dimensions have indices with moderate-to-good internal consistency, and there are three single-item domains. Analysis by age and sex shows that elderly respondents rep...

Measuring multiple dimensions of religion and spirituality for health research: Conceptual background and findings from the 1998 General Social Survey

Objectives. Although a number of authors have proposed that older volunteers should benefit in terms of better health and well-being, few researchers have examined the issue empirically to see whether this is true. The purpose of this article is to build on this literature by empirically examining the association between volunteering and mortality among older adults. Methods. Using data from a nationally representative sample, we use Cox proportional hazards regression to estimate the effects of volunteering on the rate of mortality among persons aged 65 and older. Results. We find that volunteering has a protective effect on mortality among those who volunteered for one organization or for forty hours or less over the past year. We further find that the protective effects of volunteering are strongest for respondents who report low levels of informal social interaction and who do not live alone.

/pdf/volunteering-and-mortality-among-older-adults-findings-from-n740z5knlm.pdf

Marc A. Musick

Papers

Who cares? Toward an integrated theory of volunteer work

Volunteering and depression: the role of psychological and social resources in different age groups.

Volunteers: A Social Profile

Measuring multiple dimensions of religion and spirituality for health research: Conceptual background and findings from the 1998 General Social Survey

Volunteering and Mortality Among Older Adults: Findings From a National Sample