==== Front
Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.1311
igaa057.1311
Abstracts
Session 2955 (Poster)
Social Networks and Support I
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Social Network Types and Health Among Older Singaporeans
Malhotra Rahul  Sung Pildoo  Chan Angelique W M  
Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, Singapore
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”407 407
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Little is known about the heterogeneity and dynamics in older adults’ social networks and their bidirectional relationship with health in Asian societies. We investigate (1) social network types, (2) how network types predict health, and (3) whether health influences network types over time among older Singaporeans. We use data from Transitions in Health, Employment, Social engagement and Inter-Generational transfers in Singapore Study (THE SIGNS Study), a national longitudinal survey, collected in 2016-2017 (wave 1) and 2019 (wave 2). Latent class analysis is applied to identify distinct social network types and how they affect self-rated health after two years. Latent transition analysis is then employed to examine the pattern of change in network types between waves, and the relationship between baseline self-rated health and transition in network types. We identify six social network types: diverse, diverse but less socially engaged, immediate family, extended family, living alone yet diverse, and restricted (proportion at baseline: 7.2 %, 38.2 %, 14.1 %, 27.1 %, 7.0 %, and 6.4 %, respectively). Older adults in the ‘living alone yet diverse’ network type are less likely to report poor self-rated health after two years than those in the restricted and extended family network types. Additionally, we find that good health is related to more diversified network types—‘diverse’ and ‘diverse but less socially engaged’—at baseline, and network types are relatively stable over two years. These findings contribute to the literature by capturing complexities in the reciprocal relationship between social network types and health in later life.