The tightly knit village community is an element with which people from urban and suburban communities may be unaccustomed. Washington Post writer Shankar Vedantam describes the healing power of strong social ties for schizophrenia patients in such communities. Vedantam tells the story of a woman who recovered from schizophrenia thanks to “an embracing village that never excluded her from social events, family obligations and work”. A thirty year study by the World Health Organization concluded that “people with schizophrenia […] typically do far better in poorer nations such as India, Nigeria and Colombia than in Denmark, England and the United States.” Vedantam highlights the difference in the approach to treatment in India versus the United States, explaining that family and a sense of belonging is an element often missing for patients in the US who may be “homeless, in group homes or on their own, in psychiatric facilities or in jail”.
It’s interesting to ponder the differences in the nature of social ties between the suburban lifestyle like that of many people in the US and that in a small village. The tremendous physical mobility that we have due to transportation technologies enables us to have a huge number of contacts, while communications technologies like the internet allow us to maintain ties across wide geographical barriers. In a small village, on the other hand, people are restricted to a tight network of strong ties. My hypothesis is that people in smaller villages have considerably more strong ties than those in suburban communities in part because village dwellers don’t need to expend the time maintaining a network of weak ties. Suburban life offers greater anonymity, but at what social cost? In such an environment I think we need to work harder at developing strong relationships, as they might come less naturally.
The results of this study also remind us that not all answers lie in technology (in this case, drugs and medicine) and that the importance of furthering relationships with one another cannot be underestimated.
[…] A number of recent posts on the class blog have discussed the importance of social networks in the fabric of communities. timo writes about differences in the patterns of strong and weak ties in small villages versus urban or suburban settings in highly developed parts of the world. icarus discusses a recent study indicating that people have access to increasing numbers of social connections, but that the number of strong ties per person is shrinking. The news article linked from the post quotes Robert Putnam, whose book Bowling Alone is one of the more extensive recent works to document this phenomenon. zachlipton writes about a study on the social network structures that surround entrepreneurs, and notes that the social network links one uses for emotional support may be different than those used for problem-solving or task-directed goals. It’s definitely true that in the discussion on weak ties, one of course shouldn’t forget that strong ties are crucial too, as is the interaction between strong and weak ties. See also the recent paper by Shi, Adamic, and Strauss on networks of strong ties. […]