this article deals with social support and its importance in the well being of chronic mental patients and their families. stuctural and functional characteristics of scial network, and their effects on adjustment of chronic mental patients are reviewed. it emphasizes, interventions in social network of chronic mental patients to increase social support and strengthen social networks.

Network datasets typically exhibit certain types of statistical patterns, such as within-dyad correlation, degree heterogeneity, and triadic patterns transitivity clustering. The first two these can be well represented with a social relations model, type additive effects model originally developed for continuous dyadic data. Higher-order multiplicative models, which are related to matrix decomp...