Kin and Nonkin under Collective Threat: Israeli Networks during the Gulf War

Abstract

T7his study presents a rare glimpse of how people use their social networks during a mortal threat. In surveys done around the time of the 1991 Gulf War, we asked residents of metropolitan Haifa, Israel, to tell us from whom they received support during the missile attacks. The results show that Israelis relied more on kin than they did in their everyday networks. However, how much they relied on kin varied by type of support, specifically by whether the help was the comfort and advice of conversation often provided by friends or was more immediate and direct aid overwhelmingly provided by kin. While we reinforce earlierfindings that people turn to kin in crises, we also show that nonkin provide a specific form of social support. Sociologists study personal social networks for a variety of reasons. Some analyze relations among individuals to identify social boundaries, others to understand how social relations might vary with structural conditions or historical eras. Yet others study how networks might help sustain physical and mental health. This article joins the strand of literature concerned with how interpersonal relations provide support during times of severe crisis. Among the common research questions are: Who seeks social support in an emergency? Who provides that support? How do the pattems of support in a crisis compare to those during everyday life? In this article, we add to the literature an unusual case study of network structure during a severe crisis: the rain of missiles upon Israeli civilians during the 1991 Gulf War. We report findings from a pair of surveys that asked respondents whom they turned to for support during the Iraqi missile attacks. * This study was funded by the Baruch Venger Fund at theHaifa and GalileeResearch Institute of the University of Haifa and by the Committee on Research, University of California, Berkeley. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of theAmerican Sociological Association, August, 1992, Pittsburgh. Direct correspondence to Yossi Shavit, Department of SPS, Instituto Universitario Europeo, 50016 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI), Italy (shavit@datacomm.iue.it); or Claude S. Fischer, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (fischer1@cmsa.berkeley.edu). ? The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, June 1994, 72(4):1197-1215 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.170 on Sat, 23 Jul 2016 06:12:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 11987/ Social Forces 72:4, June 1994 We fielded a preliminary survey in Haifa region during the last week of the war and the three weeks that followed. We also administered a revised and larger survey several months later. Specifically designed questions allow us to find out: (1) whom these Israelis turned to for emotional and practical exchanges during the war; (2) how those associates compared to the ones respondents typically turned to for more routine needs; and (3) which Israelis had more social support during the crisis and which had less support. This is, frankly, an opportunistic study, the major advantage of which is that it provides systematic data on social support for a representative sample of people during a real and severe crisis. The Gulf crisis was also the source of the study's major disadvantage: We could neither plan the research with sufficient lead time nor could we revise it in time to collect more data during the crisis. Both the onset and end of the war were out of the researchers' control.