Social connections are the cornerstone of a human being’s life and health.
From the moment we are made the seemingly individual choices and
social circumstances of our parents as well as the social encounters throughout
life in part shape who we become. In addition, these social factors
are also key for the propensity to live a good, long and healthy life. This
PhD-dissertation consists of four quantitative social-epidemiological studies.
These utilize different conceptual approaches to measure qualitative
and quantitative aspects of social relationships and their associations
with several adverse physical and mental health outcomes. An
added important contribution of this dissertation is the utilization and
demonstration of statistical methods and conceptual approaches from
the field of machine learning and life course epidemiology.