JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Social interactions are important for well-being, and therefore researchers increasingly attempt to capture people’s social environment. Many different disciplines have developed tools to measure the social environment, which can be highly variable over time. Psychologists often use experience sampling methods to study dynamics within a person and the social environment. Additionally, various disciplines use digital phenotyping to longitudinally capture social behavior in a passive manner via sensors from smartphones or other wearable devices. Furthermore, sociologists use repeated egocentric networks to track how social relationships are changing. Each of those methods are likely to tap into different but important parts of people’s social environments. A development and implementation of these various methods has occurred thus far largely separately from each other.

Objective:

Our aim was to synthesize the literature on how these methods are currently used to capture changing social environments in relation to well-being and to assess how to combine those methods best to study well-being.

Methods:

We conducted a narrative systematic review according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA).

Results:

We included 275 studies. Three important points follow from our review. First, each method captures a different but important part of the social environment and at a different resolution. Second, measures are rarely validated, which undermines the robustness of conclusions drawn. Third, a combination of methods is currently lacking but is essential in understanding well-being.

Conclusions:

We discuss how different methods can be productively combined to form a holistic perspective on the social environment. Lastly, we highlight the practice of using poorly validated measures which will hamper progress in understanding the relationship between the changing social environment and well-being.