social capital

Pregnancy can be stressful. Friends and family may have good intentions, giving informal support to expecting mothers, but their helpful hints sometimes come across as critical. A doula, however, provides emotional support before, during, and after birth, and helps women make informed health decisions.

Sociologist Lisa Hall talked to Missouri State News about her research on doula services and how these workers’ contribute women’s well-being. Hall reflected on one interview:

The client’s words were, “if it had not been for my doula, I think I might have just left my baby with my husband and moved away.” She had no confidence that she could be a good mom—especially in the midst of criticism—and the doula empowered her.

Many doula clients receive WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) services and lack access to adequate healthcare due poverty or homelessness. Furthermore, lack of education and connections (part of what social scientists call “social capital”) prevents many low-income and young women from asking questions or expressing health concerns. And, for all women, a doula can serve as a liaison to health service providers. Hall elaborates, “It’s a major view shift for some of these [expectant mothers] who haven’t been taken seriously or hadn’t been treated like an adult …”.

Taking a client’s physical and emotional needs seriously is just one aspect of doula services. The Doula Foundation teaches effective parenting, helps with healthcare access, and encourages breastfeeding, all of which benefit mothers and their children by providing a tool kit of positive health practices. Other groups, like the Isis Rising Prison Doula Project, bring doula services into spaces where birth may have even further complications.

When Tanya Marie Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist, studies religion, she’s not asking whether God is real. Rather, she wants to know how believing in a higher power affects the lifecourse. Writing in The New York Times, Luhrmann argues that the positive effects of church attendance go beyond simply increasing social capital through community interaction—it can be a psychiatric boon:

What I saw in church as an anthropological observer was that people were encouraged to listen to God in their minds, but only to pay attention to mental experiences that were in accord with what they took to be God’s character, which they took to be good. I saw that people were able to learn to experience God in this way, and that those who were able to experience a loving God vividly were healthier—at least, as judged by a standardized psychiatric scale.

Luhrmann’s work centers around “the way that ideas held in the mind come to seem externally real to people,” and she notes that belief in God is not always beneficial (for instance, some may feel only despair when they search for religious guidance). To that end, Luhrmann uses her essay to encourage more research into the relationships between mental illness and religion. Like many topics that interest social scientists, the challenge here is to move beyond, “Is this good or bad?” to explore, “When and for whom is this good or bad?”

As sociologists, sometimes we just can’t stop connecting concepts we read in magazines or on TV to our field.  So, it’s always nice when we see the concepts are connected for us and, more importantly, for a broader public.

As I was exploring internship opportunities for my students this semester, I ran across a tidbit of sociological knowledge on the the website of an organization that supports battered women and children (Casa de Esperanza).  It reads:

Casa de Esperanza works to enhance social capital because we believe that it decreases domestic violence. Social capital refers to the trust, reciprocity, information and co-operation that are developed through social networks.

And it even cites Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone!  Needless to say, I was impressed.

With over 800 million active users, Facebook must be affecting our relationships—some even wonder if acquiring hundreds, even thousands, of online companions is helping or hindering our “real life” connections to others. It’s no surprise that new research on this topic by Cornell sociologist Matthew Brashears is making a splash in media outlets from ABC News to The Times of India and The Telegraph. Brashears work asks, even in this hyper-connected world, do we have as many close friends as we think we do?

In short: no. According to Brashears’ longitudinal research (which looked at over 2,000 adults from 1985 to 2010 and was published in the journal Social Networks), the average number of close friends—people with whom respondents said they’d discussed important matters with during the past six months—most of us report is two. Just 25 years ago, the average was closer to three. Brashears is quick to point out that we’re not becoming asocial. He thinks we’re getting better at being careful in selecting our confidants. Perhaps we now favor a smaller, tighter network for our true support system even while we enjoy more casual, diffuse online networks.

ABC News went a bit further to ask whether Facebook was actually to blame for this culling of comrades. The news outlet turned to a Pew Research Center report written by another sociologist, Keith Hampton of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Hampton took a rosier view in a blog post on the subject:

Internet users in general, but Facebook users even more so, have more close relationships than other people. Facebook users get more overall social support, and in particular they report more emotional support and companionship than other people.

Different networks, we know, fulfill different needs. Facebook reports that its average user has 130 friends—as of this writing, there’s just no separate category for “real friends.”