Mental Wellbeing and Social Inclusion

Social Networks and Mental Wellbeing

Community connections, reaching across place, interests and identity, are largely untapped assets that can promote wellbeing and address social exclusion. Redefining the role of public services and their relationship to citizens will require a better understanding, use and development of this potential. But successive government policy initiatives have largely failed to harness and build the social networks and social capital of public service users.

In a forthcoming pamphlet for the RSA, Professor David Morris, FRSA, will argue that at a time when statutory duties are being rapidly reframed as community responsibilities, there is an urgent need to better understand what encourages and discourages community involvement and how different forms of involvement generate social outcomes.

Action Research

This pamphlet forms the theoretical basis for an exciting new action research project that the RSA is undertaking in 7 different areas of England. This action research project will analyse how different interventions build and sustain individual’s personal networks. By doing so it will demonstrate and explore how the community dimension of people’s lives contributes to well-being and how it can be developed through a variety of activities.

Projects will be undertaken in 7 different areas of England. In each area the programme will work with a VCS organisation with a concern for social inclusion and mental wellbeing and with a ‘host authority’ – a public sector agent with a concern for social inclusion and mental wellbeing.  This authority will participate in the research and shape future delivery as a result of the research.

In each area we will run a series of workshops, with a representative sample of the local community, to describe (through mapping) how their communities function. These workshops will enable us to refine terms and indicators so that we are all working to a common understanding of interventions and outcomes.

In each area training will be provided for community researchers, covering a variety of methods to encourage people to talk about their lives and communities. These researchers will then undertake a social network survey, with a set of questions designed to elicit people’s assessment of their personal networks and community experience generally. In particular, the conversations will seek to identify how, where and why people connect with one another, and what happens as a result.

After analysing the results of this survey, we will then design and implement a number of strategic and proactive interventions that are intended to facilitate networking and build social capital. These might include changes in the way services are delivered (using for example self-directed support), the introduction of co-production models for managing health or community development projects which foster self-help and collective action, and light touch ways to enable existing social networks to become more visible, inclusive, and useful.

We will work with communities and service providers to gather comprehensive interim data in mid-2012 and reflect on the experience so as to refine and further test the interventions.  From late 2013 we will collect the final post-intervention data. This data will include the same range of outcome indicators (for example relating to well-being and inclusion) and be subjected to further social network analysis. The findings will be used to assess impact and to draw lessons for policy and practice. There will also be an evaluation of the project itself (its design, execution and relevance).