Social integration and social support: Moving “social support” beyond the individual level

Abstract

Despite the extra-individual nature of social relationships, social support and social networks have been treated by and large as individual-level concepts. This article describes some of the forms that an individualistic bias takes in our current approaches to conceptualization and measurement of social support and social networks and suggests three steps towards an extra-individual treatment of these concepts: (1) expand notions of social support to encompass social integration; (2) examine the role of groups and settings as social network “members”; and (3) explore functional and structural characteristics of social networks as independent and dependent measures.

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