Social comparison involves positioning the self relative to others on a vertical or status dimension (ranging from upward to downward comparisons) and a horizontal or solidarity dimension (ranging from contrastive to connective comparisons). Across 3 studies in which 389 undergraduates recorded everyday social comparisons (n = 4,417), downward and connective comparisons were rated as more helpf...

The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice 2004 report Improving Health Care: A Dose of Competition expresses a clear allegiance to competition as the organizing principle for health care. In Europe, by contrast, the key organizing principle of health care systems is solidarity. Solidarity means that all have access to health care based on medical needs, regardless of ability to pay...

BACKGROUND Little is known about social capital and health among older adults in South Africa. This study investigates the association between social capital and several health variables, namely: self-rated health, depressive symptoms, cognitive functioning and physical inactivity, among older South Africans. METHODS We conducted a national population-based cross-sectional study with a nation...

Although questions about social cohesion lie at the core of our discipline, definitions are often vague and difficult to operationalize. Here research on social cohesion and social embeddedness is linked by developing a concept of structural cohesion based on network node connectivity. Structural cohesion is defined as the minimum number of actors who, if removed from a group, would disconnect ...

Military communities in tactical networks must often maintain high group solidarity based on the trustworthiness of participating individual entities where collaboration is critical to performing team-oriented missions. Group trust is regarded as more important than trust of an individual entity since consensus among or compliance of participating entities with given protocols may significantly...

I found just the place for me...even though one doesn’t accomplish great things. But we know what we want. We chose this...We aren’t going to give in to power, staying home. It’s good for us to be out in the street, doing something, awakening the recognition of folks. It’s tied to the solidarity of others with you... It comes from my father and sharing a plate of food, and the neighbours...You ...

Family composition and relationships may undergo significant changes upon immigration and settlement. This article approaches teen-parent relationships through the intergenerational solidarity framework, which addresses three areas of conflict and/or consensus related to (a) functional solidarity, (b) consensual solidarity, and (3) normative solidarity. Interviews took place in the Sri Lankan T...

Humor can serve numerous functions in discourse. This paper provides a tool for categorizing functions of humor, and uses this tool to highlight statistically some interesting patterns in the humor of New Zealand men and women. The humor occurring in 18 New Zealand friendship groups was analyzed according to function and these functions were organized into a taxonomy. Functions of humor occurri...

A rich civic infrastructure of community-based organizations (CBOs) can help generate, diffuse and maintain a culture of engagement and health that benefits marginalized populations most at risk for illness, disability, and poor health. Attention to CBOs advances "meso-level" frameworks for understanding health cultures and outcomes by going beyond attention to social networks and social identi...

This article traces the way autonomy has become a recognised value in health care in France. In a country that based its social fundamentals on the very idea of solidarity for many years, autonomy has long been considered a foreign 'Anglo-American principle'. Taking the example of the end-of-life debate, the article shows, however, how the use of the French term 'accompagnement' allowed autonom...