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Understanding everyday help and support: summary
- Authors:
- ANDERSON Simon, BROWNLIE Julie, MILNE Elisabeth-Jane
- Publisher:
- Joseph Rowntree Foundation
- Publication year:
- 2015
- Pagination:
- 4
- Place of publication:
- York
A summary of a study examining low-level or everyday help and support and the role it can play in allowing people to lead ‘liveable’ lives. The study explored the ways in which the need for (and availability of) such support is shaped by social context, biography and relationships. It also looked at how support actually happens (or not) and how it is sustained over time. Key findings included: small acts of help, support and kindness were often mundane and barely noticed (even by those involved), but had fundamental consequences for individual and community well-being; although this everyday help was often practical, it could have important emotional consequences; individual circumstances, life stage and life events (e.g. parenting, ill health, retirement) created needs for informal help and support, but also ways of potentially meeting those needs; powerful emotions and moral considerations attached to these apparently straightforward acts, particularly notions of reciprocity and who should be considered deserving of help; many of the perceived risks of helping or being helped related to people’s concerns about their self-image or how others saw them; collectively, these acts and relationships of everyday help and support had an ‘infrastructural’ quality - they made possible other aspects of social life, but needed attention, maintenance and repair in their own right. The briefing concludes that while it is not possible to legislate for kindness, attempts should be made to avoid damaging – and, where possible, foster and extend – the conditions in which it occurs. (Edited publisher abstract)
The liveable lives study: understanding everyday help and support: report
- Authors:
- ANDERSON Simon, BROWNLIE Julie, MILNE Elisabeth-Jane
- Publisher:
- Joseph Rowntree Foundation
- Publication year:
- 2015
- Pagination:
- 61
- Place of publication:
- York
This study highlights an overlooked component of social cohesion – everyday acts of informal help and support within communities. While such acts are often mundane and practical - small loans, lifts, help with shopping - they can also have a significant emotional dimension. Although these acts are often simple, navigating them is not: the researchers find that opposing moral forces complicate this picture. Concepts of the ‘deserving’, of stoicism and the imperative to help others all feature in this study. Key points include: the character of informal support among family, friends and even strangers is shaped by the social and physical characteristics of areas but also by the narratives that attach to them; in the often unspoken moral framework underpinning these interactions, both reciprocity (giving back) and mutuality (where both parties benefit from the interaction) are important elements; public policy needs to recognise both the interactional complexity and the emotional significance of everyday help and support. In the context of political debate around austerity and the scope of the state, the infrastructural qualities of such relationships need to be recognised. While such support makes possible other aspects of social life, it also requires maintenance and repair in its own right. (Edited publisher abstract)