Preference for Nature in Urbanized Societies: Stress, Restoration, and the Pursuit of Sustainability

Urbanicity presents a challenge for the pursuit of sustainability. High settlement density may offer some environmental, economic, and social advantages, but it can impose psychological demands that people find excessive. These demands of urban life have stimulated a desire for contact with nature through suburban residence, leading to planning and transportation practices that have profound implications for the pursuit of sustainability. Some might dismiss people's desire for contact with nature as the result of an anti-urban bias in conjunction with a romantic view of nature. However, research in environmental psychology suggests that people's desire for contact with nature serves an important adaptive function, namely, psychological restoration. Based on this insight, we offer a perspective on an underlying practical challenge: designing communities that balance settlement density with satisfactory access to nature experience. We discuss research on four issues: how people tend to believe that nature is restorative; how restoration needs and beliefs shape environmental preferences; how well people actually achieve restoration in urban and natural environments; and how contact with nature can promote health. In closing, we consider urban nature as a design option that promotes urban sustainability.     

Introduction: The Residential Context of Health

Our understanding of the relationship between housing and health will improve with closer attention to the characteristics of residents, their activities in relation to their housing, and social ecological factors that set the boundaries for those activities. To highlight these aspects of the subject area, we propose recharacterizing the housing and health field as one of inquiry into the residential context of health. In introducing this issue of the journal, we first elaborate on this proposal in conceptual and practical terms. We then overview the individual articles, each of which helps us develop a more nuanced view of the subject area. Finally, we comment on two themes running through multiple articles—stress and coping, and social ecological influences on residence .     

The division of child care among couples with young children: An empowerment model

In this article, we present a qualitative analysis of couples’ child care arrangements using an empowerment model. Data are taken from gender-segregated focus group interviews with eight married, co-residential couples parenting young children. We analyze this data using an empowerment model that focuses on individuals’ experiences recognizing and acting on opportunities to exercise control, which in this case we conceptualize as preferences for child care involvement. In addition to this focus on interpersonal negotiation between parents, we build on Bronfenbrenner's (1979, 1986) ecological perspective and understand child care arrangements as emerging within complex social systems, demanding constant negotiation between the person and environment. Thus, our attention to empowerment includes a focus on the notable contexts of work, school, and community. We find that in many ways, both mothers and fathers in our sample felt little control over ecological factors shaping child care arrangements. For mothers, empowerment was a process that involved varying degrees of control over fathers’ involvement in child care within the further confines presented by work and school. Fathers generally felt empowered to engage in child care tasks when they chose to do so. This stands in contrast to mothers’ implicit responsibility for the care of their children and need to request fathers’ involvement unless social contexts demanded it.     

Managed care: Challenges to survival and opportunities for change

Many agree that the health care delivery system is in serious trouble. Managed care emerged in response to growing concern over spiraling health care costs without commensurate increases in population health outcomes. However, managed care needs to be evaluated within the historical context of using rationing strategies to distribute health care resources. This paper will explore the impact of managed care on social work practice, including the many challenges faced by practitioners. It will conclude with a discussion of potential opportunities for change in this volatile, health care environment.     

Homelessness, Mental Illness and Citizenship

Assertive mental health outreach to homeless persons, which operates under the premise that mental illness must be understood and treated within the individual's social and economic environment, points towards the goals of community membership and 'citizenship'—a connection to the rights, responsibilities, roles, and resources that society offers through public and social institutions and informal 'associational life'—for homeless persons. We argue that the concept of citizenship is a useful framework for approaching these goals. We review the principles of assertive mental health outreach and relevant aspects of contemporary citizenship theory; present a case example of outreach leading to a 'citizenship project'; and discuss the potential benefits and pitfalls of a citizenship framework, including strategies and recommendations for program administrators, researchers and policy makers.     

Mental Health Policy in South Australia: A Job Half Done

Though the emphasis in South Australian mental health policy on deinstitutionalisation is based on sound principles of civil liberties and psychiatric treatment, serious social problems have followed in the wake of the new initiatives. This paper attributes many of the problems to the simultaneous pursuit of deinstitutionalisation and centralisation of resources within psychiatric hospitals. It is argued that the policy of deinstitutionalisation demands a commensurate decentralisation of resources to enable the development of community-based residential and nonresidential alternatives to hospital.     

Nested or Networked? Future Directions for Ecological Systems Theory

Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory (EST) is among the most widely adopted theoretical frameworks for studying individuals in ecological contexts. In its traditional formulation, different levels of ecological systems are viewed as nested within one another. In this article, we use Simmel's notion of intersecting social circles and Bronfenbrenner's earlier writing on social networks to develop an alternative ‘networked’ model that instead views ecological systems as an overlapping arrangement of structures, each directly or indirectly connected to the others by the direct and indirect social interactions of their participants. We redefine each of the systems discussed by EST—micro, meso, exo, macro, and chrono—based on patterns of social interaction, and then illustrate how this alternative model might be applied in the classic context of the developing child. We conclude by discussing future directions for how the networked model of EST can be applied as a conceptual framework, arguing that this approach offers developmental researchers with a more precise and flexible way to think about ecological contexts. We also offer some initial suggestions for moving a networked EST model from theory to method.     

Weak ties: a mechanism for helping women expand their social networks and increase their capital

This paper proposes a model for helping women expand their opportunities by using weak ties. It discusses social support networks and their impact on women’s ability to expand their social connections and increase access to opportunities, resources, and jobs, thus supporting the importance of whom one knows. It presents the context in which women seek opportunities and presents “weak ties” as a mechanism for helping women to move beyond their immediate social networks to connect to persons with diverse resources. It discusses human, social, cultural, political, and economic capital and suggests ways women can increase these forms of capital in a model that suggests incorporating opportunities for women to come together and help each other to identify and utilize resources.     

Someone to check in on me: social capital,social support and vulnerable parents with very young children in the Australian Capital Territory

Although knowledge of how social support can mediate stress is now well known, finding ways to enable isolated parents to access social resources that could make a positive difference for children during their critical early years remains difficult. This paper reported on the findings of a telephone survey aimed at understanding levels of social capital and social support experienced by isolated parents raising young children on their own in Canberra, Australia. Specifically, it discussed a successful methodology for reaching isolated parents, those whom services find hard to reach. The survey found that despite the relative affluence of Canberra's population, there is a significant group of parents who are isolated from both formal and informal support and the social capital that can help them cope with the stresses and demands of raising young children. These parents were unsure where to get parenting information and had a strong sense that they were judged by their local communities and services. We identified lost opportunities by general practitioners and other widely used systems such as public housing and security to take more proactive roles and connect parents to formal service support systems. Flexible, affordable child care was identified as an unmet need for these parents, not only as a source of relief from extreme isolation but also to enable them to work or prepare for work through study.     

Improving health care delivery to aging adults with disabilities: social work with dual eligibles in a climate of health care reform

Adults aging with disabilities comprise a diverse group. In this article, we identify the prevalence and characteristics of this target population, focusing on adults who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. We articulate challenges in the delivery of health, social, and support services to adults aging with disabilities, particularly how existing health care policy and financing contributes to fragmentation of care. Finally, we identify opportunities for social workers to advocate for and promote system improvements in the delivery of care for aging adults with disabilities in the current climate of health care reform.     

Cross-national differences in effects of social embeddedness on trust: A comparative study of German and Dutch business transactions

Embeddedness theory stresses the importance of concrete personal relations and networks of relations in economic life. Recent sociological research shows that effects of embeddedness may differ between social settings, and recent experimental anthropological findings reveal that levels of cooperation and norm-enforcement differ between cultural settings. We extent these lines of research by examining whether effects of embeddedness on trust differ between two social settings, namely Germany and The Netherlands. To examine our research question we use a comprehensive database consisting of 925 Dutch and 929 German purchase transactions. We find evidence that some aspects of social embeddedness indeed have different effects in the two countries. In Germany sharing a history of previous transaction and the existence of alternative partners had a larger effect on trust than in the Netherlands. We offer a potential explanation and discuss its implications for future research on embeddedness.     

Paradigm Shift: Why a Focus on Health Is Important

Traditionally, medicine and the social and behavioral sciences have studied health by focusing on pathology. The purpose of this issue of the Journal is to go beyond such a vulnerability model and focus on thriving. We suggest that thriving represents something more than a return to equilibrium following a challenge. This issue describes a "value-added" model, whereby an individual or community may go beyond survival and recovery from a stressor or illness to thrive. We suggest that this change of focus from illness to health represents a paradigm shift. This article gives an overview of the various ideas featured in this issue, which elaborate empirical and theoretical work on the concept of thriving. Ultimately, we believe that the scientific study of thriving can enhance our understanding of health and provide important opportunities for prevention and intervention.     

Sensing Bodies and Digitally Mediated Distress

ABSTRACT

In The Five Senses (2008) Michel Serres shows how the body is not an abstracted, dislocated surface that allows for the objectification of the senses and instead illustrates how it is a process: one of continually infolding sensitivities that translate our bodily feelings into a fluid sense of the world. In this article we explore what it means to be a body in the mediated environments of everyday lives of those who visit social media sites that are designed to help people deal with mental distress. We will discuss the way that “bodies” must tack between oft-competing pressures and draws, which emanate from the performance of sense that is contained within these sites. Attempts to “make” sense of the body in such terrains often require an increasingly sophisticated set of skills and expertise and can, despite our best efforts, result in the body being transported to unexpected places. In order to capture a sense of movement, people must try to transform their offline experiences into a set of actions that can be rendered meaningful in terms of an online domain, which we argue is against the way that people sense. We develop a theory of sensory bodies as subject to continual “movement,” drawing on the work of Serres, Simondon, and Manning, before discussing three examples of social media use in mental health, and the potential implications for people having to learn to sense in and through such online spaces.     

Alcohol and Aborigines In Cross-Cultural Situations

During a two-year association with Sydney Aboriginal households, opportunities arose for observation and discussion concerning alcohol use, and certain impressions emerged: (a) personal factors related to problem drinking stressed by investigators such as the McCords could operate among the Aboriginal people; (b) drinking customs fulfil certain social needs; the public drinking house serves several functions within urban Aboriginal life, including communication and social integration as well as relaxation. Social control of alcohol abuse demands provision of functional equivalents of these aspects of drinking patterns; and (c) whilst the role of racial tension in the genesis of problem drinking is not clear, racial factors may contribute to personal stress and communal malaise among the Aborigines. The complexity of the genesis of the present situation is stressed and its understanding is considered to be a continuing challenge.     

The potential power of social policy programmes: income redistribution,economic resources and health

Lundberg O, Fritzell J, Åberg Yngwe M, Kölegård ML. The potential power of social policy programmes: income redistribution, economic resources and health Int J Soc Welfare 2010: ??: ??–??© 2010 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Journal of Social Welfare. This Supplement includes a number of articles dealing with the role of social policy schemes for public health across the life course. As a key social determinant of health, poverty and its consequences have historically been at the forefront of the public health discussion. But also in rich countries today, economic resources are likely to be important for health and survival, both on an individual and an aggregate level. This introductory article serves as a background for the more specific analyses that follow. The focus is on why income and income inequality could have an effect on individual and population health. We discuss relationships between the individual and population levels and between income and health, and some of the possible mechanisms involved. We also present arguments for why welfare state institutions may matter.     

Resident-Managed Elder Intentional Neighborhoods: Do They Promote Social Resources for Older Adults?

Social isolation has serious negative public health impacts for older adults. Survey data were collected at three resident-managed elder intentional neighborhoods in the United States (n = 59), to determine if these neighborhoods, each based on the cohousing model, promote development of social resources for their residents. Social resources were measured on three dimensions: social networks, neighborly support, and satisfaction with the neighborhood community. Respondents were White, mean age of 73.3 (range = 63–91), primarily female (76.3%), and generally had high levels of education and self-reported health. Almost half (47%) were never married/divorced and 37% were childless. Inclusion of neighborhood ties ameliorated risk of social isolation. Satisfaction with support and a variety of neighboring behaviors were reported. These neighborhoods are meeting the needs of a potentially at-risk population as an avenue to promote social resources and reduce social isolation. The implications for gerontological social workers include a role in helping to mobilize and support these types of neighborhoods as a way to encourage mutual support among older adults. With the increase in the aging population, such models of proactive interdependence and communal coping have the potential to lessen or delay the demands that socially isolated elders place on social workers.     

户口还起作用吗?——户籍制度与社会分层和流动(英文)

户籍制度是中国社会一项基本的制度安排,它把户口作为资源配置和利益分配的重要凭据,对社会分层和流动产生了较大的影响。在改革开放近三十年后,中国的户口还起不起作用,以及起着怎样的作用？通过对综合社会调查数据的分析,发现中国社会分层具有城乡户口差别和城市户口等级差别并存的特点,户口转变和迁移的开放性程度与个人社会流动机会获得有正相芙关系。市场转型虽带来了较多流动机会,但户口等级差别以及户口对体制内流动所起的结构性影响依然存在。鉴于户籍制度的强粘附性生成了社会差别,改革这一制度的基本方向是推行户口一元化和迁移自主化。     

SPECIAL ISSUE： ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION AND BEAUTIFUL CHINA Essentials of the Construction of an Ecological Civilization

建设生态文明,必须要在社会生产力发展中顺应自然,注重人的文明发展,保护自然生态系统,遵循生态经济规律要求进行社会再生产,把传统的机器大工业下高碳、线性的生产方式逐步转变为低碳、循环的生产方式,通过科学发展,满足人工生态系统良性循环要求。     

Researching Quality of Life in Early Old Age: The Importance of the Sociological Dimension

Measurement of quality of life has become a major feature of much social and epidemiological research in health and social care settings. It is seen as an important alternative to more process‐based outcome measures but remains poorly defined. A major weakness is the absence of any coherent theoretical underpinning whether sociological, psychological or philosophical. Into this conceptual vacuum proxies for quality of life have been introduced. Quality of life [QoL] research into older populations has focused on measures of health and illness as equivalents of QoL. This paper argues that this response is inadequate as it reduces old age to a dimension of health, disability and disease. Instead, we argue that it is necessary to create a theoretically based measure of QoL in early old age which relates to those aspects of later life that are not defined by health. We present a model of QoL that is derived from aspects of contemporary social theory as they relate to the ontology of late modernity. In particular, we utilize a model based upon needs satisfaction. The model contains four domains: Control, Autonomy, Pleasure and Self‐realization. The measure consists of a 19‐item scale. The four domains load on to a single latent QoL factor. We argue that the CASP 19 scale offers an approach to QoL that integrates a sociologically based model of quality of life with a meaningful and valid research instrument.     

Models of 'ordinary' and 'special' daily living: matching residential care to the mental-health needs of looked after children

This paper proposes a set of distinctions between ‘ordinary’ and ‘special’ modes of everyday living in residential settings for young people in the ‘looked after’ system. The paper begins by reviewing both quantitative and qualitative evidence on the mental‐health needs of the young people, arguing that there is evidence of very high levels of mental distress and disturbance within this group, and that this distress is often undiagnosed and untreated both by psychiatric professionals and within the residential care system itself. There follows a commentary on the tacit assumptions underpinning much residential practice, especially the emphasis in some policy and legal documentation on the young people’s need for ‘ordinary’ everyday experience. The concept of the ‘ordinary’ is problematized, and it is argued that while young people do need to be supported towards mainstream ‘ordinary’ everyday living, they also need specialized everyday care in which their emotional and psychological needs can be recognized and responded to. Four models of ‘special everyday living’ are proposed, based upon existing literature on residential practice, and it is argued that residential care programmes should be based upon a mix of these special and ordinary provisions if the young people’s emotional needs are to be met.