Quality of life: a social network’s perspective

In this study, we develop a theoretical model based on social network theories and the quality of life (QOL) model to understand how social interactions influence Mental and Physical QOL in the context of cancer patients. Current literature showing how structural, dyadic and network level perspectives influence QOL remains lacking; therefore, this study contributes toward addressing this gap. It also illustrates how social network data, which is primarily time-consuming to obtain, can be extracted from current social surveys. Using the US National Health Interview Survey 2010, we (1) demonstrate how relational data are extracted for (2) investigating the association of egocentric network properties (structure, position and relations) with Global Mental and Global Physical QOL. Results show that there are significant differences in the network properties (degree and tie strength,) of those experiencing High and Low Mental QOL and Physical QOL. These findings are critical to influencing interventions and policy development for enhanced Mental and Physical QOL in cancer care. This is an extended version of a preliminary conference paper that was presented in ASONAM 2014 (Hemmati and Chung in IEEE Comput Soc 572–579, 2014).