RESOURCE FILES
Chapter 8
Building Social Relationships: Intimacy and Families
Robert Wuthnow
The Quest for Community
How do people
establish connections to one another in today's mobile, fragmented social world? In the
early 1990s, sociologist Robert Wuthnow conducted a national survey and face-to-face
interviews to find out.
Wuthnow's
subjects were people deeply involved in small voluntary groups, such as special interest
clubs, community associations, weight-control groups, Bible study groups, and book
discussion groups. He also studied a comparable sample of people who were not members of
such groups.
Wuthnow
discovered that the depiction of Americans as "a society of lonely, self-interested
individualists suffering from isolation, disrupted families, a lack of friends, difficulty
in establishing intimate relationships, and the demeaning anonymity of large-scale
institutions" does not provide a complete picture of contemporary social life.1
Our family
ties may indeed have become looser than in previous eras, and we are, perhaps, more
inclined to fear our neighbors today than to feel a common bond with them. Nevertheless,
we have been able to find meaningful relationships and a sense of community elsewhere.
Wuthnow found
that 40% of adults 18 and older living in the continental United States (roughly 75
million individuals) claim to be involved in "a small group that meets regularly and
provides caring and support for those who participate in it."2
Thirty-eight percent of them are involved in at least two or three groups, and half have
been involved for five years or more.
Small
voluntary groups have also become a mainstay of established social institutions. Religious
organizations, for example, alarmed by shrinking memberships, have made small
groupsóBible study groups, support groups, youth ministries, retreat centersóa vital
part of their programs. Many Jewish communities are experimenting with havurot, small
informal gatherings in private homes.
Intimate
gatherings like these meet a variety of needs:
[They] draw
individuals out of themselves, pull them out of their isolated personal lives, and put
them in the presence of others where they can share their needs and concerns, make
friends, and become linked to wider social networks. Small groups provide a way of
transcending our most self-centered interests; they temper our individualism and our
culturally induced desire to be totally independent of one another. . . . Even amidst the
dislocating tendencies of our society, [we] are capable of banding together in bonds of
mutual support.3
Wuthnow
points out that small voluntary groups function very much like families. Both involve
relatively few people who interact intimately, both can involve strong emotional bonds,
and both help to shape people's identities.
But small
groups and families are also different. Small group members typically don't share the
heritage, physical traits, or personality characteristics that connect people in families.
In addition, members of small groups don't bear legal responsibility for feeding,
clothing, sheltering, educating, and providing medical support for others.
Small
voluntary groups are also different from other social connections that have traditionally
given people a sense of belonging, such as neighborhoods, ethnic groups, tribes, and so
forth. With these other forms of community, people generally live in the same area, see
each other a lot in the course of their everyday lives, and identify themselves with
various aspects of material culture, such as buildings, streets, parks, food customs, and
distinctive clothing.
In contrast,
in the small groups Wuthnow studied, people from various locations and perhaps different
subcultures come together regularly (on average, once a week) for group meetings.
So the sense
of community we derive from small groups, unlike families and neighborhoods, is something
over which we have a great deal of control. We choose which groups we want to join, and we
choose whether or not to attend a meeting. We may feel an obligation to provide emotional
support and may even donate a lot of money and time to the group, but we have no serious,
formal, legal responsibilities to do so.
Yet these
intimate settings are effective ways of encouraging both spiritual renewal and a sense of
belonging.
1Wuthnow, R. 1994. Sharing the journey.
New York: Free Press. p. 12.
2Wuthnow, R. 1994. Sharing the journey.
New York: Free Press. p. 45.
3Wuthnow, R. 1994. Sharing the journey.
New York: Free Press. p. 12.
David Newman and Rebecca Smith.
(Created September 14, 1999). Copyright Pine Forge Press.
http://www.pineforge.com/newman. |