People's Social Relationships Research Articles

Social support in people with chronic aphasia

Background & Aims : Stroke and aphasia can have a profound impact on people's social activities, and family and social relationships. This study looked at patterns of social support in people with chronic aphasia following stroke. It examined the relationship between social support and quality of life, exploring which aspects of social support (social network versus perceived social support) were most associated with health-related quality of life (HRQL). Methods & Procedures : A cross-sectional interview-based survey study was conducted. A cluster-sampling framework was used to recruit participants with chronic aphasia following stroke (> 1 year) from three different sites in the south-east of England. Measures included the Stroke and Aphasia Quality of Life Scale-39 item version (SAQOL-39), the MOS Social Support Survey (SSS), and a social network questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, correlation, t -tests, and ANOVAs were used as appropriate. Outcomes & Results : The results of those able to self-report (83 out of 95 participants, 87%) are reported here. In terms of social networks, the mode of the size of network was 4. Size of network was associated with HRQL for women only. Most participants (71%) reported they had the same amount of contact with their children following the stroke, while 64% reported they saw their friends less. Those who had the same level of contact with their family as before the stroke had the highest HRQL scores; those who saw them either less or more than before the stroke had lower HRQL. In terms of perceived social support, the SSS scores were negatively skewed with a mean (SD) of 3.69 (.95), suggesting that participants felt overall well supported. Two types of support were significantly correlated with HRQL: social companionship and informational support. Clinical implications : Therapy services for people with aphasia could consider ways to enhance social companionship and informational support as this may positively impact on HRQL. Implications could include complementing and supporting existing social networks, and facilitating access to information and social participation.

Quality of Life in Older Adults: Benefits from Caring Services in Hong Kong

Many older adults are in need of care. Therefore, older people would generally benefit from the use of caring services, notably including home care, residential care, nursing, and medical services. The contributory factors underlying caring services tend to be a caring perspective that aspires to sustain older people's social relationships and real-life involvement. To gauge the benefits from various social and health services, the present study relies on a large-scale survey of 3000 older adults in Hong Kong, using quality of life as a criterion. Results showed that an older adult who had used (ordinary or enhanced) home care services for a longer time turned out to have appreciably more improvement in quality of life. Besides, those who joined an interest group more frequently were higher in quality of life, including the health domain. On the other hand, frequent use of medical and meal-to-home services were signals that reflected problems detrimental to the older user's quality of life. Despite this, the quality of clinics or hospitals, as perceived by the older adult, was the most beneficial. As such, caring services that foster older adults' interests, cater to their health care needs, and embody quality can have principal contribution to their users' quality of life.

Social capital and cultural participation: spousal influences on attendance at arts events

Empirical efforts to study the determinants of participation in the arts have demonstrated that adult attendance at arts events is influenced by adolescent exposure to the arts, educational attainment, and current income. While many have illuminated the impact of family socialization and individual characteristics, they have neglected the ways in which people's social relationships influence their adult participation in the arts. This paper begins to redress this imbalance by focusing on the role of one crucial relationship—the tie between spouses—in shaping attendance at arts events. The importance of social ties is demonstrated by the finding that spouse's background has an impact on an individual's arts participation com-parable to one's own characteristics and that this effect persists even net of one's spouse's own attendance. Consistent with theories of a gendered division of cultural labor, men's attendance is more strongly influenced by spousal characteristics than is women's attendance.

Cannabis and smoking research: interviewing young people in self-selected friendship pairs.

This paper will discuss the use of paired interviewing as the main method of generating data in a study exploring the social context of young people's smoking and cannabis use. The research, conducted as part of an on-going PhD, involved 59 participants of both genders, aged 13-15 from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and with a wide range of cigarette and cannabis use experience. Participants were offered the choice of an individual interview or a paired interview with a friend of their choice, most opting for the paired format. The paper will discuss many of the methodological and ethical features of this method. In particular, it will discuss the potential for paired interviewing to access accounts generated within close friendship bonds, making this method distinctive from larger focus groups. It will also explore how paired interviewing facilitates access to interactions between participants, shedding light on many aspects of young people's social relationships and allowing occasional glimpses into more private territory. It will argue that the paired interview method can make a novel and distinctive contribution to health education/promotion research, policy and practice, and to any research that aims more fully to understand aspects of young people's social worlds.

Beneath the surface of organizational processes

This paper raises the question, “What is an effective representation framework for organizational process design?” By combining our knowledge of existing process models with data from a field study, the paper develops criteria for an effective process representation. Using these criteria and the case study, the paper integrates the process redesign and information system literatures to develop a representation framework that captures a process' social context. The paper argues that this social context framework, which represents people's motivations, social relationships, and social constraints, gives redesigners a richer sense of the process and allows process redesigners to simultaneously change social and logistic systems. The paper demonstrates the framework and some of its benefits and limitations.

Affect and Personality as Predictors of Conflict and Closeness in Young Adults' Friendships

We examined the relations of affect and personality to qualitative aspects of young adults' friendships. Members of 131 friendship dyads evaluated the quality of their relationships and kept diaries of the conflicts they experienced during a 4-week period. Positive and negative affect (PA and NA) emerged as independent predictors of the extent to which people felt close to their friends, of how much irritation they felt toward one another, and of the amount of conflict reported during the recording period. Extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness also predicted measures of friendship quality. The data suggest that variations in affectivity are robust predictors of qualitative aspects of people's social relationships.

Services for People with Mild Intellectual Disabilities and Challenging Behaviour: Service‐user Views

Twenty‐six people with mild intellectual disabilities and challenging behaviour, who had all been service‐users at a specialist, hospital‐based unit, were interviewed after they had left the service for an average of four and a half years, about their current quality of life and their memories of the service. On the whole, people were still living in the community though many had had a large number of placement moves (and some had returned to hospital or prison). The service‐user's overall quality of life in their current placement was as good as that of the general population in the less restrictive environments but fell increasingly short of this standard as the placements became more restrictive. Even in the best placements people's social relationships appeared impaired when compared to the general population. With respect to their memories of the specialist service, it appeared that, despite the time period, service‐users had a clear memory of the service, appreciated many aspects of it (such as the help staff provided, the therapy and education), were divided about some aspects (such as having to be in hospital, being detained under the Mental Health Act 1983, taking medication) and had very strongly negative feelings about aspects of the care which directly restricted their liberty (such as the locking of the front door, the use of restraint and seclusion). It is argued that there may be a need to re‐think services for service‐users with challenging behaviour and mild intellectual disabilities.

Uncertainty and Confidence in Interpersonal Projects: Consequences for Social Relationships and Well-Being

To examine the extent to which the appraisal of interpersonal projects influences people's social relationships and well-being, 202 female students were asked to complete the Personal Projects Analysis (PPA), the revised Beck's Depression Inventory (BDI) and Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale, and to answer several self-report measures of social relationships. Then, one year later, they completed the UCLA Loneliness scale, the Perceived Stress scale, the revised BDI and several self-report measures of social relationships. Two groups of students were identified on the basis of their PPA ratings: (1) the socially confident group, with positive and confident appraisals ( n = 74) of their interpersonal projects, and (2) the socially uncertain group, with negative and uncertain appraisals (n = 35). The results showed that the women in the socially uncertain group reported more negative interactions with their parents and with their boyfriend/spouse, and also fewer new acquaintances, than the socially confident women. Moreover, they showed higher levels of depression, stress and loneliness, but lower levels of self-esteem.