Demographic Variation in Social Support and Intimate Friend Across 22 Countries: A Cross-National Analysis.

Abstract

Prior research documents strong associations between social support and having an intimate friend with improved health and well-being outcomes, with most of the evidence based on data from the U.S. However, less is known about how these indicators of having close social connections differ across countries and across demographic groups within those different countries. The development of targeted, culturally appropriate interventions around close social connections requires understanding how they vary across countries and demographic groups. This study presents an in-depth, cross-national exploration of social support and having an intimate friend and its variations across key demographic groups. Using a diverse and international dataset of 202,898 individuals from 22 countries, this paper examines relationships between levels of social support, having an intimate friend, and key demographics, including: age, gender, marital status, employment status, education, and immigration status. The descriptive results present the ordered means of social support and the ordered proportion of having an intimate friend across countries. Globally, most people report having an intimate friend (84%) and people who will help them (7.4 on scale of 0-10), both of which, however, vary greatly across countries, and highlight who does not. They also vary greatly, overall, by employment status, educational level, and religious service attendance. This work illuminates the distributions and descriptive statistics of social support and having an intimate friend across these demographic features and offers insight into country-specific variations that lay a valuable foundation for future investigations into sociocultural influences that might shape close social connections.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41042-025-00226-0.