From Best Friend to Soul Mate: Sociodemographic Variation in Social Relationship Quality Across 22 Countries

While prior research demonstrated strong positive associations between social relationships and health and well-being, less is known about how subjective evaluations of the quality of one’s relationships differ across countries and across sociodemographic groups within different national contexts. Using data from the Global Flourishing Study, a diverse global dataset of 202,898 adults from 22 countries, we examined the average level and distributions of social relationship quality by sociodemographic characteristics across and within these countries. Our results showed variation in social relationship quality across nations, with averages in most countries between 7 and 8 (on a scale from 0-10), although higher averages were observed in Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, and lower averages in Turkey and Japan. The meta-analytic results indicated there was significant variation in social relationship quality across most sociodemographic factors examined, most notably patterns of increasing social relationship quality by age and frequency of religious service attendance. For marital status, married and widowed adults reported higher social relationship quality, while separated and divorced adults reported comparatively lower social relationship quality. Variation was also observed by employment status, with retired adults reporting the highest social relationship quality and unemployed adults the lowest. Patterns of sociodemographic differences also varied across countries. Findings from this study provide insight into the population distributions of social relationship quality—a key social factor influencing well-being—and lay the foundation for future investigations into the sociocultural influences that shape social relationship quality around the world.