CRANFORD STRONGER

TOGETHER

HOUNSLOW TOGETHER

BOARD

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JANUARY 2015

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Contents

About the RSA 4

About this report 5

Executive Summary 6

Introduction and methodology 9

Wellbeing, coping and struggling 13

Research Findings: Wellbeing 15

Research Findings: Social networks and isolation 20

The Well-Connected Community 30

Ways Forward 38

Annex - ethnographic cases 43

Annex - additional Social network data and analysis 58

Annex - additional statistical findings and statistical methodology for

wellbeing factors 62

Appendix (survey materials) 65

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About the RSA

The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) is an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative and creative practical solutions to today’s social challenges. Through its ideas, research and 27,000-strong Fellowship it seeks to harness the extraordinary amount of untapped creative potential in society – by empowering people to be active participants in creating a better world.

The RSA Action and Research Centre combine practical experimentation with rigorous research to create a unique programme of work. Our approach is inspired by our history of solving big problems by unleashing the human potential for enterprise and creativity.

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About this report

This report is in two parts. The first section outlines the research process and summary findings. The Annexes provide the detailed data: the ethnography stories of Cranford residents; the social network case studies and the quantitative data summary

Acknowledgements

This report contains the stories of Hounslow residents who gave their time to speak to us. We are very grateful to them and must note that the names of interviewees have been changed to protect their identities. We are also grateful to the Hounslow Together Board and the steering group comprised of council officers, local professionals and community members. The contribution of volunteer community researchers in conducting door-to-door wellbeing and social networks surveys was invaluable; the authors would therefore like to thank Aima Ahmed, Serena Verdenicci, Namaah Al-Mahdi, Ahmed Shaal, Caroline Stephen, Carys Roberts, Barbara Moses and Jack Robson for their time and efforts in helping to conduct these survey interviews. Additional statistical analysis was carried out by Karim Secker, with support from Aima Ahmed and Serena Verdenicci.

Authors

This report was written by Matthew Parsfield and David Yates, with social networks analysis and visualisations by Gaia Marcus. For more information on the work please contact matthew.parsfield@rsa.org.uk.

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Executive Summary

This report presents the findings of social networks analysis, a wellbeing survey and ethnographic research into a particular residential area in Hounslow. Focusing on the matters of wellbeing, social connections, and community resilience, the research provides background insight for Hounslow Together Local Strategic Partnership’s ‘Cranford Stronger Together’ programme, which seeks to explore ways of improving social outcomes through maximising communities’ potential to support local people.

Based on survey data from 170 residents as well as ethnographic research conducted between July and September 2014, the paper sets out a number of findings, analyses, and routes for further action. It provides insight into the Hounslow Together Board’s working hypothesis that a key driver of public service demand and poor outcomes is the mental wellbeing of individuals and their ability to ‘cope’. By better understanding both the manifestations and the determinants of wellbeing, including the impact of relative social isolation, the project board hopes that individuals and the communities they live in can be better supported to become more resilient, improving local outcomes while also reducing excess demand on public services.

The research indicates that rather than being a simple, homogenous phenomenon, there are three kinds of social isolation found in the area. There are socially isolated individuals who lack social connections, but also socially isolated groups – stable communities of people who support each other in different ways, but who lack the diversity and connections with other communities and institutions that would bring them greater social capital and increased adaptability during times of struggle. Finally there are locally isolated individuals – those with active and satisfying social lives further afield, but without strong social ties to the local area. Individuals fitting this last typology can be disinclined to participate in their local community, and lack a local safety net to support them in times of crisis.

Similarly, low mental wellbeing, rather than being a single uniform state, is shown to have different constituent factors relating to different aspects of people’s lives, which affect different people at different times. Statistical analysis of survey data demonstrated that these aspects have to do with external or material factors relating to their life stress; their mood, outlook and mental state, and finally their sense that they are getting by – an unexpected finding that suggested that low wellbeing was associated with people having a high tendency to feel that they are responding to their problems well and thinking clearly.

This last point links to the major ethnographic themes emerging from the research, that people with low wellbeing in the area could be said to be ‘struggling’ rather than ‘not coping’. Struggling better reflects

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the lived experience of people with low wellbeing, reflecting the active engagement with the sources of difficulty in their lives, the competing pressures on their time and resources, and their attempts – successful or not – to respond to various troubling situations. It also, however, points to the vulnerability of those in difficult situations, with the risk that their personal situations can deteriorate if their struggles are unresolved.

The social networks analysis points towards a somewhat fragmented community, albeit one with numerous scattered sub-communities of close social ties. The existence of loosely connected informal networks and otherwise isolated individuals around a number of key institutions – the local housing provider, a council-run library and community centre, a church and the volunteers and activists associated with a Tenants and Residents Association – suggest that those institutions have considerable potential bridging capital, or in other words the capacity to bring otherwise disconnected or isolated individuals and groups together in novel and socially productive ways.

The first section of this report presents a commentary on the methodology and key findings of the research with the intention of benefitting the project co-design group in subsequent phases of the Cranford Stronger Together project. The Annex section includes more detailed ethnographic portraits of a number of local residents who were ‘struggling’ in different ways, as well as further detail from the social networks analysis.

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Themes and Findings

Wellbeing

• Low wellbeing – or struggling – is complex in its causes, manifestations and responses.

• Factors of low wellbeing include those relating to life stress, mental state and battling to feel like one is getting by.

• Some of the sources of struggling include health concerns, financial worries, or battles with housing and welfare bureaucratic services.

• The variety of simultaneous problems and dynamic activities experienced by people who are struggling makes life extremely difficult – draining them of the resources to be more productive (socially, personally, or economically), and putting them at high risk of becoming more troubled and isolated.

• However the ‘resourcefulness’ of people who are struggling is indicative of personal assets and potential hidden wealth that could be harnessed in more favourable contexts.

• Part-time work is more strongly associated with lower wellbeing than any other employment status – including unemployment.

• People with positive opinions about the community tended to have higher wellbeing, and people with more social contacts tended to have higher health satisfaction.

Networks

• There are socially isolated people on the estate who lack any meaningful social contact. This has dramatic negative effects on their wellbeing.

• There are other kinds of problematic social isolation, even for those who do have social contacts: people may be isolated locally despite having important relationships further afield. Isolation is not necessarily the same thing as ‘loneliness’.

• Some social networks are isolated and therefore do not maximise their social capital – they lack the novelty and benefits of more diverse connections, and do not efficiently share their assets with other local groups.

• There is potential for these different network typologies to become linked in mutually beneficial ways through focused network weaving that makes use of existing and emerging ‘hubs’ of shared connection.

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Introduction and methodology

Purpose of the study

This insight report was commissioned by London Borough of Hounslow and the Hounslow Together Local Strategic Partnership as part of the ‘Cranford Stronger Together’ project. Its aim is to provide a better understanding of what isolation and wellbeing look like in one neighbourhood in Hounslow to help inform the co-design phase of the project, which will explore ways of working with the community to better support people with low wellbeing.

A research team from the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce and Manufactures (RSA) conducted the research and authored this report. The brief was to undertake mixed methods research including social network analysis of relationship and wellbeing data collected from door-to-door surveys, and ethnographic enquiries to develop greater insight into the day-to-day challenges and lived experience of those who are ‘not coping’.

Introducing Cranford

The research site was located in the west London Borough of Hounslow, defined as the neighbourhood Lower Layer Super Output Area 016B. This is located in Cranford ward, and predominantly consists of the Meadows housing estate and two adjacent streets. The population of the LSOA is 1,7551.

Fig 1. Aerial view of the LSOA. Credit: Google Maps.

The research site was selected by the Hounslow Together Board, the Local Strategic Partnership for the area, from a shortlist of Hounslow LSOAs that fall within the 20% most deprived nationally. The

1 2011 Census

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Board’s analysis of these deprived areas demonstrated that this neighbourhood is ranked first in the Borough for the Years of Potential Life Lost and it is ranked third on the Proportion of Adults under 60 suffering Mood and Anxiety Disorder indicator. Anecdotal evidence suggested that despite numerous different initiatives, the area persistently presented the same challenges. Other key facts shown in this initial analysis are:

• It is the second most deprived area in the Borough • It has the second highest number of adult social care clients

• It is the seventh highest on the 'acute morbidity indicator' health ranking

• It has the third highest rate of socially-rented housing • The ethnicity of the neighbourhood is predominantly White

British (41%), with 13% Black Caribbean and 11% Black African being the next most populous ethnicities.

Community-led quantitative research

By focusing a research project in a small neighbourhood-level residential area, it was possible to conduct research with both breadth and depth. The depth was largely provided through the ethnographic research, but in order to cover a larger sample of the resident population, it was necessary to recruit, train and collaborate with local volunteer community researchers supervised by the RSA research team.

Nine community researchers were recruited with the aid of newsletters dropped through letterboxes in the local area, posters in prominent places, and advertisements through local volunteer organisations. Each community researcher received training in research ethics and techniques, safeguarding, and health and safety, and worked with the RSA team to co-design the survey. The insight of local volunteer residents at this stage was invaluable in drafting a survey with the appropriate tone, language and length.

The survey2 asked for a range of information, including nationally validated wellbeing data (using the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale – WEMWBS), public service use, opinions about the local community, and name- and resource-generators for social networks analysis.

On sixteen days during July, August and September 2014, these community researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with residents on their doorsteps. Every social housing tenant and most private tenants and owner/occupiers in the area received a newsletter informing them that the research was due to take place and inviting them to take part, and posters were displayed in local cafes and shops. Every single residential property in the area was visited, with

2 See appendix for full survey

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the community researchers recording whether the resident answered the door or not, completed the survey, refused to participate, or requested to be interviewed at a different time. Door-to-door enquiries were made on different days by researchers working in pairs; interviews were conducted during weekday daytimes and early evenings as well as on Saturdays. A total of 170 individuals were interviewed, representing 13.85% of the adult population. This sample was broadly representative in terms of age, gender, working status and ethnicity.

Statistical analysis including regression and factor analysis was conducted on this data. Some findings from this analysis are summarised in Chapter Two of this report, with methodology and detailed findings available in the Appendix.

As well as conducting survey interviews, community researchers also instructed the RSA research supervisors to make repeat visits to those respondents whose interviews suggested they might be suitable candidates for more in-depth ethnographic research. These referrals were made either because respondents had given negative responses for the wellbeing questions, or because their conversations had otherwise suggested they may be at risk of ‘not coping’, the focus of the study. Follow up visits were made by RSA researchers to these individuals, and some of these individuals became ethnographic research participants through more extended contact.

Social Network Analysis

In order to gain an understanding of how people are connected to each other, the survey included a ‘name generator’ section to collect data for social network analysis. These questions3 elicited respondents’ ‘strong ties’ by asking them to name up to five people they know for each question. The questions prompted the respondent to name people they know in different ways, or who fulfil different roles in the respondent’s network. For example, one question asked the respondent which people they ‘enjoy spending time with’ or who they see socially, while another asked which people the respondent would ask to borrow money from if she lost her purse.

Respondents were then asked to specify which of her contacts knew each other – for example a respondent might mention both her brother and her sister for different questions, and then state that her brother and sister share a connection with each other, as well as to the respondent.

The answers for the social networks section of each respondent’s survey were later aggregated using social network analysis computer software (NodeXL and Gephi), in order to create a ‘network map’ of all the social relationships reported by the 170 respondents, providing a visual representation of who knows who in the study area.

3 See full survey in appendix for all questions.

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Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research methods were used to supplement and contextualise the data acquired through the survey research. A combination of techniques was used in order to gain greater insight into the lived experience of residents and the meaning and manifestation of low wellbeing in the area. These techniques included focus groups, extended unstructured interviews, life histories, auto-photography tasks, and participant observation.

Ethnographic research participants were identified in two main ways. RSA researchers initially entered the community through a brokered introduction with the most active committee members of the local Housing Association’s Tenants and Residents’ Association (TRA). After initial interviews and a focus group with this small number of individuals, researchers were introduced to the TRA’s friends and associates, who then in turn introduced the researchers to their associates. These referrals included engaging with an older people’s social group and a parent and toddler group both linked to the TRA members’ networks. This ‘snowball technique’ of researching outwards from the initial TRA members quickly enabled the researchers to come into contact with residents who are less known to the Borough Council and Housing Association.

The researchers also made follow-up visits to residents who had responded to the door-to-door survey and either given answers that suggested they were experiencing low wellbeing. These follow-up visits consisted of more extended unstructured interviews about the person’s life and experience of wellbeing, with arrangements for further meetings and participant observation made in some cases.

Seven participants were involved in one-to-one participant observation with RSA researchers trained in postgraduate ethnographic research methods. The researchers joined the residents for everyday activities, such as going to church, making dinner, or visiting local services and amenities. Beyond these seven primary participant-observation participants, around 20 residents took part in the other ethnographic research activities including focus groups and extended unstructured interviews.

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Wellbeing, coping and struggling

Wellbeing

The World Health Organisation defines wellbeing as: ‘a state in which every individual realises his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community’4. To measure the wellbeing of our study group, we used nationally validated subjective wellbeing measures5 and the surveys included questions about life satisfaction and different sources of stress6.

Coping

Coping can be most usefully thought of as a process rather than a trait. Coping is something people attempt, feel, do – successfully or not – to manage life’s demands, rather than an inherent ability7. As such, coping effort is independent of outcomes – that is, coping doesn’t necessarily have to be successful in any objective sense in order for it still to be understood as coping8. As such, a binary distinction between ‘coping’ and ‘not-coping’ is of limited use. Instead, coping should be understood as a process that varies across time in different situations. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Thomas S. Wiesner9, we observed ‘patterns of coping’ experienced by our respondents, defined as follows:

Stable/Sustainable. People exhibiting this pattern are likely to report high life satisfaction with happiness with the community.

Improving/Resilient. This pattern of coping may experience some material struggle, but they feel that they have the capacity to adapt and respond effectively.

Vulnerable but Struggling. Precariousness is a feature of this pattern, and people may struggle to maintain a routine and ‘keep their heads above water’

Multiply Troubled. The distinction drawn between this pattern and the ‘Vulnerable but Struggling’ pattern is that of a more resigned

4 http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/mental_health/en/

5 The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale -

http://www.nhs.uk/Tools/Documents/Wellbeing%20self-assessment.htm

6 See appendix for full list of questions.

7 Lazarus, RS (1993) ‘Coping Theory and Research: Past, Present, Future’,

Psychosomatic Medicine 55:234-247

8 Ibid, p237

9 Wiesner, Thomas S. (2009), ‘Well-Being and Sustainability of Daily Routines: Families

with Children with Disabilities in the United States’, in Pursuits of Happiness: Well-being in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Mathew, Gordon and Izquierdo, Carolina. New York/

Oxford, Berghan Books

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attitude, typified by bitterness or anger and the sense that things will get worse, and an impulse to withdraw from a society or community.

It is important to note that these patterns are not fixed and there is no inevitable progression between them. An individual may experience or exhibit elements of one or more of the patterns simultaneously, or in rapid succession. More detailed portraits of the characteristics of individuals experiencing each pattern of coping can be found in the Annex to this report.

We observed a particular fluidity and precariousness between the Vulnerable but Struggling and Multiply Troubled patterns exhibited or experienced by some residents, with some people exhibiting a mix of traits typical of both patterns, and with those experiencing the Vulnerable but Struggling pattern appearing to be at risk of their situation deteriorating. For this reason, we prefer to refer to the range of experiences in these patterns of coping as ‘struggling’ in order to capture this fluidity, rather than classifying individuals as coping or not, or focusing only on individuals who are temporarily exhibiting the traits of one particular pattern.

The concept of struggling is an important one. In Wiesner’s model above, and corroborated by our qualitative research in the field, people can be vulnerable but struggling; struggling is an active process and one that can that can be part of the response to difficult – vulnerable – situations. The concept of struggling is of more use here than that of ‘not coping’, more obviously being an action or process than a fixed state, and better reflective of the flux between the experience of difficult situations and responses – successful or not – to these situations.

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Research Findings: Wellbeing

Statistical analysis of the 170 responses to our survey revealed that three sets of wellbeing and stress questions tended to ‘load’ or correlate with each other, so when respondents gave a low score for one question, they would tend to give a low score for others in that same set. These three sets of questions (grouped together as Life stress, Mental state, and Getting by, below), each taken as independent factors, also gently correlated with each other. As a result, we were able to group the questions together as a scale, with a low score indicating poorer wellbeing10. This showed patterns that helped us to understand the various factors that constitute somebody’s wellbeing and helped us to identify a cohort of people who were ‘struggling’ in different ways.

In our research we did not rigidly define objective criteria relating to life outcomes in order to establish whether people were ‘coping’ or not; instead we interviewed participants using a survey to understand their subjective wellbeing. From the patterns that emerged from the study, the factors that constitute somebody’s wellbeing can be defined as follows:

Life stress: which has to do with material situations, for example concerns about health or concerns about finances. The survey items that constitute this factor are ‘Things are getting on top of me’; stress about debt/finances; stress about health, and stress about family life.

Mental state: which has to do with life satisfaction, optimism, and how relaxed and useful a person feels.

Getting By: the sense that you are dealing with problems well and are able to make your mind up about things, that you are feeling close to other people and that you feel you can make up your own mind about things. Paradoxically, in this study, giving high score on these survey items was actually associated with lower wellbeing; as such this score is reverse-scored, with a ‘low score’ (i.e. ‘bad score’) meaning that they exhibited this negative factor. The reasons for this phenomenon are somewhat unclear; it may be due to people with lower wellbeing being more aware of their problems, or we may be observing some kind of embattled reaction from people who are really struggling in the midst of their problems.

By adding these three factors together we developed an Overall Coping Scale. About 10% of our sample had a low score on this scale.

Out of our 170 survey respondents, the following numbers have low scores on the various factors of wellbeing (taking a ‘low’ score on each factor to be a score significantly below average11):

10 See appendix for methodology and correlation figures. 11 Defined as one standard deviation below the mean

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Wellbeing factor Number of respondents

with a low score

% of sample with low score

(more than one standard

deviation below the mean)

Mental state 16 9.4%

Life stress 22 12.9%

Getting By 20 11.8%

Low score for all three coping factors 3 1.8%

Low score in Overall Coping Scale

(aggregate of all three wellbeing

factors)

17 10%

Though only three people in our sample returned a low score for every individual wellbeing factor, 10% of the sample had a ‘low’ score for the composite Overall Coping Scale of the three individual wellbeing factors. This 10% included the majority of the individuals we had observed as ‘struggling’ in the course of the ethnographic research.

Statistical regression revealed that having lived on the estate for longer correlated with having a negative ‘getting by’ score, as did answering positively to survey questions about the local community (‘How often do you say hello to people in the estate?’, ‘This is an area where people look after each other’, and ‘I feel I belong to something I would call a community’). These interesting findings might point to something specific about the local area, such as social norms around dealing with problems (a number of residents in their 60s and 70s mentioned the importance of ‘getting on with it’ when referring to difficult periods of their lives). Alternatively it could be reflective of people being physically and mentally ‘stuck’ in their present situations, battling with longstanding issues from which they can see no obvious exit. It would be prudent for local service workers and others in the community to be alert to the possibility that people who have lived in the area for a long time, with a strong affinity with the local community, may be experiencing poor wellbeing despite asserting that they feel on top of their problems.

Struggling and service use

Our findings support the hypothesis that high public service use is associated with low wellbeing. One section of our survey asked

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respondents which public services they use12, and how frequently – whether they had used a service in the last six months as a one off or more frequently due to recurring need. Though people with low scores in our Overall Coping Scale constituted 10% of our overall sample, they were overrepresented among respondents who told us they were repeatedly using local services. This supports the original hypothesis that low wellbeing of certain struggling individuals is a significant driver of demand on public services.

Struggling people with low scores in the Overall Coping Scale made up:

• 18% of those repeatedly visiting GPs o They are almost twice as likely to visit the GP

repeatedly than the overall sample

• 24% of those going to the hospital for ongoing treatment

• 33% of those repeatedly going to A&E • 40% of those regularly being visited by home social care

workers • 75% of those regularly using the services of housing support

workers o They are more than seven times more likely than the

overall sample to regularly have contact with housing support workers

The experience of struggling

As indicated by the various wellbeing factors outlined above, the experience of – and causes of – struggling are multifaceted. Our ethnographic research observed that struggling is a process rather than a fixed state, and can be understood as something people do or experience. The struggling documented in the ethnography can be read in more detail in the Annex to this report, but some of the range of difficulties experienced by those who were struggling included:

• Financial difficulties, debt, and problems with bailiffs; • Struggling to deal with welfare bureaucracies after having

welfare payments cut; • Having an overcrowded house, or wanting to move home and

not being able to; • Confusion or frustration while navigating complicated

bureaucratic processes in resolving housing, health, or welfare services;

• Having physical or mental disabilities or illness, or caring for somebody who does;

• Feeling isolated, stigmatised or bullied by local people;

12 From a list of options – see survey in appendix

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• Or, alternatively, feeling harassed by the attention and stress demanded by close social networks. These networks aren’t necessarily always a source of support;

• Having difficulties finding or maintaining a job;

• Rushing between various appointments, responsibilities, or sources of support;

• Finding creative and adaptable ways to respond to some of these competing problems.

Many of these features, as elucidated in detail in the ethnographic annex to this report, can be both causes and effects of struggling, with pressures concerning finances and social networks recurring in a feedback loop. Even in those cases where individuals attribute their struggles to a single cause – such as having to start caring for a disabled relative, experiencing an episode of depression, or becoming disabled themselves – the experience of struggling will be complex, manifesting in other forms, for example the financial and mental wellbeing knock-on effects of having to give up work to care for a relative. Problems rarely exist in isolation, but become manifest as multiple troubles in a person’s life, with struggling bring coterminous with experiencing numerous difficulties. It is when financial, health and social pressures exist together that they are felt as most problematic; but these individual factors have a tendency to be syndemic, existing together and causative of each other.

Struggling as wasted effort

The recognition that people with low wellbeing are struggling is important for two main reasons. Firstly, because the capacity they put into the struggle is arguably being wasted at present, if we take an outcomes-focused perspective. The energy, time, and sometimes talent and creativity of their struggles could be conceived of as potential assets to be harnessed for more ‘pro-social’ ends within an altered and less troubled context. A number of our research participants who were struggling described themselves as resourceful, and demonstrate dynamic attempts to negotiate their struggles - sometimes reactive and sometimes creative. Examples of these techniques from across a number of ethnographic cases include managing a complex diary of sources of free food and arguing for benefit payments to be reinstated; dealing simultaneously with bailiffs, food banks and family demands; fighting, looking for technically illegal cash-in-hand work, and even considering taking drastic measures to get one’s family evicted in order to gain a better chance of being moved into a larger council house. Not all of these actions are legal, productive, successful or helpful for the individuals involved or for wider society. But neither are they passive or apathetic, and similar amounts of effort in a more favourable context might result in better outcomes.

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Struggling as vulnerability

Secondly, an appreciation of struggling is important because those who are struggling, as well as being active, are vulnerable. Struggling is difficult. As exhibited in the ethnographic case studies in the Annex, struggling in response to the causes of low wellbeing involves a tremendous expense of energy and capacity. The problems local people experience are complicated, various, and arise simultaneously from different sources, and drain them of the time and resources to participate in the community in other ways. The capacity expended in the struggle can prevent the individual from moving into a different, more resilient or sustainable, pattern of coping, and increases the risk of slipping into even more difficult situations of entrenched problems.

There does seem to be an even more troubling state which we might term ‘beyond struggling’. The ethnographic chapter ‘Struggling and Withdrawing’ in the Annex provides illustration and analysis of this , with portraits of people who seem to be at various stages of ‘giving up’ their struggles after protracted struggles without improvement. Acute, remedial intervention with the cooperation of the various acute services and housing providers who often remain among the only social contacts such people have, is to be recommended in such extreme cases, while the benefits of taking preventative action while people are still struggling before they reach such tipping points.

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Research Findings: Social networks

and isolation

Social networks on the estate

The social networks we recorded on the estate are diverse and fragmented, with the majority of respondents listing social contacts who are unique to themselves and not shared with other respondents. This fragmentation can be observed in the array of isolated groups and clusters around the outskirts of Fig 2, which are not connected to each other. Many of these contacts were to people who live away from the estate. Some of the implications of this will be detailed below.

Despite this fragmentation, there is a ‘core’ to the network of loosely interconnected groups people and resources, with several identifiable sub-groups within this core (Fig 3.).

Fig 2. Social network map made up of answers to all social connections questions in the survey. The fragmented nature of the social network can be observed by the array of isolated small groups around the outskirts of the map: these are the unique social connections reported by different survey respondents that do not connect to other respondents’ networks. Each dot on the map represents an individual person or an institution a person has

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mentioned a social relationship with (e.g. ‘the library’). Each line is a reported relationship between people or institutions. The different colours represent significant sub-communities – groups of people with similar connections in common.

Some of the sub-groups of interest have been coloured to identify them. They are:

• Fuchsia – members of the Housing Association Tenants and Residents Association (TRA) and their families, friends and contacts. One individual in particular from this group was named as a source of support or practical help by a number of other residents. This group is visible as the central fuchsia cluster near the centre of the map.

• Blue – A group that includes volunteers and community activists connected to the local Anglican church (Church of the Good Shepherd). These individuals and their connections appear as the royal blue cluster towards the bottom of Fig.3.

• People who tended to cite local services as sources of social support, rather than people – such individuals include the grey nodes that connect the two fuchsia clusters. One of these individuals participated in in-depth ethnographic research and is profiled in the Annex to this report. See the entry for ‘Ellen’. As well as saying that she would borrow money from a highly-connected individual from the Fuchsia cluster around the TRA members, she had a well-developed knowledge of local services and was a frequent attendee at the local library, as well as various foodbanks, churches and support groups.

• Red and aqua - Individuals who are otherwise unconnected to the central core but who report a shared connection, for example to the Housing Association.

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Fig 3: zoom view of the central core of the network. The large grey

dot in the dead centre is the Housing Association.

Figure 3 is an expanded view of the central core of the network, which consists of loosely connected sub-groups somewhat tenuously held together by fragile shared connections. It is noteworthy that one of the most central nodes in this network, represented by the large grey dot in the dead centre of Fig 3, is the local Housing Association, which is acting as a ‘hub’ in this network with multiple ‘spokes’. As such, some of the people and groups that appear to be connected to this core only share in common a relationship to the social landlord, rather than to a particular person. Without the Housing Association, there would likely be no core to the network at all (Fig 4, below), with even these few sub-communities fragmenting away from each other. The hub-spoke position of the Housing Association suggests that the Association has the potential to act as a hub, bringing together these otherwise disconnected sub-groups.

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Fig 4: The core of the network with the Housing Association removed. The hub-spoke model of Fig 3 has disappeared, with the small clusters previously connected to the core by the Association no longer connected to this core at all. A single resident – the large blue dot in the centre of this image – is now the only node acting at all like a hub, with her close personal network and a few other connections fragilely forming a core of what is otherwise a very fragmented picture.

Respondents were asked questions to gauge the fabric of their social and support network that covered who they:

• Socialised and/or enjoyed spending time with; • Discussed problems with;

• Got practical help from; • Might borrow money from in an emergency; • Knew who might get things done locally.

Of the 170 respondents only 4% reported no connections at all: although some of these individuals may have been with-holding information rather than reporting absolute isolation, this seems in line with data that suggests that 5% of people will tend to report no meaningful connections at all.

Analysis of the data for these eight individuals without any reported social connections must be approached with caution due to their small number. Together they have an average wellbeing score of 3.38 out of five (on the 7-point WEMWBS) compared to 3.4 for the overall sample, with such a negligible difference not revealing any significant impact of this acute isolation on wellbeing. It is perhaps noteworthy that this small group seem to be relatively infrequent users of local public services; three of the eight had been to a GP as part of ongoing treatment in the previous six months – equivalent to 37.5 percent, which is lower than the 45.9% of the overall sample who were regularly using GP services. Other than this, one of the

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individuals uses home social care and mental health services on an ongoing basis; one of them (an individual with very low wellbeing) regularly requires the services of police, A&E and the hospital, but otherwise no other services were reportedly used by the eight people at all. With one exception, however, all of these individuals were social/association housing tenants, which suggests that housing providers – as seen in the social networks analysis below – potentially have links to people who are otherwise isolated.

Of the vast majority of people who did report some kind of social connections, the types of relationships of people in the overall sample varied. Though over 95% of respondents had some sort of social, support or trust connections – such as somebody that they enjoyed socialising with or with whom they could discuss problems with – almost 20% of people had nobody who they could talk to about problems, or who they could borrow money from. Knowing people locally who can help to change things locally, such as activists or people that could organise local events, was the least common form of connection: well over a third of people – 36% - did not know anyone like this13. Unusually, compared to other similar studies in other parts of the country by the RSA research team, nobody mentioned local politicians in this category.

More detailed social networks analysis can be found in the Annex to this report.

Box text: Community Trust

In our survey, respondents were asked to give a score between 0-10 to show

how far they agreed with a series of statements about their community:

‘This is an area where people look after each other’ – 65% gave an answer of 5

or below for this statement, with 11% giving a score of 0.

‘This is an area where people trust one another’ – 38% of respondents gave an

answer of 0-3 out of 10 for this statement, with 18% giving a score of 0.

‘This is an area where people can be relied upon to call the police if someone is

acting suspiciously’ – 57% gave an answer of 6 or above for this statement.

Socially isolated individuals

‘The bullying makes me a recluse. I’m used to it, but I don’t like it. People like me are frightened of others. I don’t smile or say hello to people. When I encounter people, I wait to see what they will do.’

13 Data in appendix

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Fig 5: excerpt from social networks map for the local community: a respondent with just one social connection.

Our data suggests that there are some people who have few or no meaningful social connections, and by their isolated nature, are extremely difficult to engage; a local housing officer said that sometimes serious isolation is only uncovered when Housing Association staff cannot gain access to a property to do the boiler check. Such ‘discoveries’ of isolated people have included a resident who was found to have been living without heating or hot water since being cut off eighteen months previously.

Our ethnographic research with such people is presented more fully in the Annex. We have reason to believe that we under-sampled isolated individuals, evidenced by the difficulty in engaging them and through the experience of such individuals seeming to be consciously ‘withdrawing’ from society. There is an element of such people ‘giving up’, with our ethnographic case studies depicting people who say that they have become used to not speaking to people, or deciding not to engage with their neighbours any longer.

Bullying, or the sense that the local community is against them, was a common theme of conversations with socially isolated people, with one individual complaining of being a victim of racist prejudice from the local white population due to her former marriage to a Black man, and another individual claiming to be harassed by local Asian people. Whether these allegations of racism or well-founded or not was not clear from the limited time the researchers were able to spend with the individuals in question, but the sense of persecution was shared by other isolated people. One person spoke of shouting and kicking at her front door making her too frightened to engage with local people, while another was exasperated by footballs ruining her garden, maintenance work around her house not being kept up to date, and neighbours not reciprocating her kind gestures such as sharing food. This sense of persecution meant that, despite complaining of loneliness or being ‘neglected’, the socially isolated individuals we spoke to were not interested in joining in with the various social groups that they knew existed in the area, seeing them as inaccessible ‘cliques’, sources of hassle, or threats.

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Mobility problems and ill health were also a common issue experienced by the most socially isolated of our research participants. Two elderly women had had their confidence damaged after painful falls in previous years, and now rarely left their homes, in part due to fears that maintenance work has not been completed, leaving trip-hazards such as wet leaves on the pavements by their homes. Caring for disabled relatives was also a factor; one woman told us she never socialises with anybody as she has to take full-time care of her husband who suffers from Alzheimers, while a young couple said they had ‘no routine’ and no social life due to the necessity of caring for their son who has severe learning disabilities.

Locally isolated individuals

‘I don’t associate with many people here because I’m always out. My friends live further away.’

Fig 6: Excerpt from social networks map of the area. Shows a respondent (centre) with social contacts from different sources who do not know each other.

Some people’s social lives were based further afield, with most of their important social contacts living away from the local area. Such people seem to inhabit the estate as a built environment, rather than truly live in it as a community. Although such people cannot be said to be socially isolated in one sense, as they do have support, friendship and trust networks, they can be isolated locally especially when things go wrong due to unexpected shocks or health problems.

One woman had a busy and fulfilling social life with friends and family living across west London and Surrey, but did not ‘associate’ with anybody on the estate despite having lived there for years. She was satisfied with the estate, enjoyed being in a ‘quiet’ corner of it, and did not have any problems with the local residents, but nonetheless did not have any close relationships locally either. Despite her relative contentment with life, she reported that without her car she would ‘stagnate’, and recalled a period in which she could not get around due to having problems with her leg when she ‘wanted to die’ because she was so helpless and lonely.

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Similarly, another resident whose only close local relationship was with her partner, had previously enjoyed a satisfactory social life off the estate despite having serious physical disabilities, using her electric wheelchair and benefits payments to travel to other parts of the Borough to go shopping, visit pubs, and meet friends. In the period in which we undertook the research, however, a problem with her eyesight meant that she had her electric wheelchair taken away from her, leaving her suddenly unable to get around, while a problem with the transfer of her benefits to her partner, who had just registered as her carer, had caused the payments to be cancelled without warning, leaving the couple drastically isolated, penniless, and not knowing what to do.

Another risk factor for the locally isolated is of having negative perceptions of the local area. Some residents whose social lives were primarily based further afield were very dissatisfied, dismissive, or fearful of the estate. This had implications for their behaviour, such as not wanting their children to play outside; and their wellbeing, such as not feeling part of the community, or their children lacking exercise or stimulation. 31% of survey respondents said that they never or rarely feel part of something they would call a ‘community’.

Socially Isolated Groups

‘A lot of people do look out for each other because there are extended families, but people tend to stay in their own groups’

Fig. 7: Excerpt from social networks map of the area. A densely interconnected group where everybody knows everyone else, but there are no contacts to anyone outside this group.

There exist numerous, densely connected networks on the estate, based around family and kinship links, old friendships forged through the decades, and formal group memberships.

These networks offer the ‘bonding capital’ of close-knit, inwardly-focused, meaningful connections between people with similar backgrounds, interests, outlooks and shared social connections (i.e. most of each person’s contacts know each other too). They foster a sense of belonging and solidarity, and they provide rapid sources of local information for their members who help each other when they can.

However, the presence of these networks does not prevent the members of these groupings from being at risk of struggling, or of

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experiencing low wellbeing. Nor are the assets within these tight networks necessarily shared through the wider community - and in some instances the existence of these socially isolated, bonded networks, can even cause harm to the wellbeing of others.

Without the diverse ‘bridging capital’ of connections to people outside one’s own immediate social group, social networks can be said to offer only limited social capital, not offering the diversity and novelty that exposes individuals to new opportunities and ways of life. Stigma from the outside can also be a problem, as people from outside the isolated group conceive of the dense network as a clique or a source of trouble.

Examples from the ethnographic research (see Annex) include a group of unemployed and underemployed men who spend most afternoons drinking alcohol in the street. These men do not lack social contact, but mixing with the same people every day can normalize some of the more harmful behaviours and limit opportunities to hear about employment, for example. The group is stigmatized and looked down upon by others in the estate, and the negative perception of them, for a minority of residents, hampers enjoyment of public space for other people who see them as a nuisance or a bad example.

A very strong local network can be observed as the fuchsia cluster at the core of the network diagram Fig 2 above. Comprised of large extended families who live on the estate and prominent members of the TRA, this group is of central importance to much community life on the estate. People in this group manage the community centre, put on annual social events, and participate in an older people’s weekly social group attended by some of the estate longest term residents. These activities provide valuable social support to the participants (see Annex). However, despite their good intentions, this group sometimes finds it difficult to engage fully with other residents; attendance at meetings is low, the main committee roles have been performed by the same small group of active members for years, and the community centre can be under-used. The strong social capital within this group is not always able to be shared with other residents, some of whom see the group as an inaccessible clique, and others who simply don’t know about the assets within the group’s network. Other local networks and assets, such as the council-owned community Hub and library, and a community group and over-subscribed community centre run by a local church, are not apparently connected to this group, limiting the diversity and interconnection of the various strong networks in the area.

Within socially isolated groups, there can also be a latent distrust of the outside; local professionals told us that up to 80% of teenagers in the area had never been to central London, and that young people report that if they were to stray off the estate and onto opposing gangs’ ‘turf’, they would be attacked. In a chat

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with a friend in the street, a woman with a very densely connected strong network and a very positive opinion of the estate and the local community, said, ‘I’d move to Wandsworth if I didn’t have my kids here. But the estate isn’t actually bad, it’s just this shit-hole area’.

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The Well-Connected Community

‘Making the community, you know, different.’

Fortunately, some people have balanced networks that encompass the benefits enjoyed by the socially isolated groups and locally isolated individuals, while keeping some of the disadvantages at bay (see Annex). How might greater cross-fertilization of different networks, including various social capital included in the networks of the socially isolated groups and locally isolated individuals, occur? And what might a desirable network look like?

Danielle Allen, an American political theorist, has talked about the importance of institutions – schools, the military, political bodies, public services, churches – in allowing for a ‘connected society’ that brings people from different backgrounds together14. There may be scope for the networks of the various institutions and community groups in and around the Meadows estate to link up more effectively, perhaps with the church hall committee referring groups onto the estate’s community centre when their hall is fully booked, or guest-managing or co-managing community events at the community centre, for example. Local public services, such as employment and welfare services, might seek to use under-utilised venues such as the various community centres in the area, to co-locate outreach and information services with platforms that encourage residents’ attendance and participation, such as community cafes or cooking activities.

One can imagine how the additional approaches and connections that ‘platform’ approaches such as these would bring could enhance the management of the estate’s facilities, bringing more people in contact with the strong social networks that have existed for a long time on the estate. Thickened resilience for the isolated individuals would come along with the thickened diversity and additional support and contacts for the socially isolated groups, and greater opportunity for novelty and unpredictable connections and benefits might accrue.

Local people are keenly attuned to the need for more diverse networks. Some talk about the potential advantages of public services and institutions co-locating services in order to capitalise on social gatherings: speaking about the under-utilisation of the council-run Hub community centre, a number of residents lamented the recent withdrawal of services that had seen the social cafe and gardening club at the Hub cancelled, meaning that parents are less likely to go and take their children. Echoing and developing these sentiments, a local public sector worker said of the Hub:

14 Allen, D. (2013) A Connected Society, Soundings: A journal of politics and culture, Issue 53 103-113.

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‘The Hub has potential to be run more as a community centre. A resident volunteer could coordinate it and link it to the other community centre. They could have barbecues or other events here to link it in better. And then services - the Citizens Advice should be here. The Job Centre should have someone here. And those services should be advertised better.’

One man discussed how he would like to see public space in the estate designed to encourage people to linger and talk to one another, allowing for new relationships to be formed:

‘Benches, picnic tables - some seats in the middle of the garden by the Ermine centre, so the senior residents would have somewhere to sit and rest and meet people. They’d get out of their flats more, see different faces, and it makes the community, you know, different so they’re not stuck inside looking at the same walls or waiting for the same person to visit them every now and again.’

(Al, resident, 60s)

Significant networks exist in the area, but these can be fragmented and inwardly focused. Other individuals orient themselves outwards. Neither type of group is immune from low wellbeing or different kinds of isolation. But with cooperation between different institutions, brokerage between various networks, and the redesigns to public space and services, it may be possible to allow for greater links between those networks.

With more diverse networks having access to more diverse approaches and contacts, as well as tailored support for the acutely isolated through other public services they are in touch with, socially isolated individuals and locally isolated individuals may find it easier or more appealing to engage with the dense but socially isolated groups - and they would bring their own approaches and wider connections with them. Such approaches will need to be co-designed by residents and the various stakeholders and deliverers of local services through the Hounslow Together board, as the sum of knowledge and creativity of these diverse actors will be greater than any overly defined route-map. The approaches will need to be co-produced in practice too, with additional social value being derived through interventions which facilitate beneficiaries of local initiatives playing an active part in their delivery. Some initial suggested ways forward ahead of starting such a process are outlined in the next section.

What would a well-connected community look like?

The network scientists Valdis Krebs and June Holley trace a four-phase progression for an emerging well-connected community, as it becomes better networked over time. These are summarised as ‘Scattered Fragments’ (Fig. 8); ‘Single Hub-and-Spoke’ (Fig. 9); ‘Multi- Hub Small-World Network’ (Fig. 10), and ‘Core/Periphery’

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(Fig. 12).15 With each of these phases representing a ‘more adaptive and resilient network structure than the prior phase’, they maintain that each stage is generally a necessary precursor to the next, its strengths and assets allowing the next phase to emerge when the progression is actively managed and encouraged.

These four phases can be represented visually in the same manner as our networks from the study in Cranford – see Figures 8-11, below, with commentary on how the model applies to the local data:

Fig. 8: Scattered Fragments16

In this phase, small clusters of a handful or fewer individuals and community assets coalesce around common interests or shared circumstances, such as family relationships. Few or none of these clusters connect to any other cluster. This phase accurately describes large parts of the social network map for Cranford, seen in Fig. 2 on page 19, above, with the majority of survey respondents naming social contacts that no other respondents shared.

However, the Cranford picture is more developed, mature and connected than the Scattered Fragments archetype, and has some similarities with the second phase in Krebs and Holley’s model: the Hub-and-Spoke phase:

15 Krebs, Valdis, and June Holley (2006): ‘Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving’, www.orgnet.com/buildingnetworks.pdf , p.5 16 Ibid, p.6

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Fig. 9: Hub-and-Spoke17

A Hub-and-Spoke network formation is similar to the Scattered Fragments phase in that there are a number of distinct ‘fragments’ of small, largely unconnected communities. However, while these fragments remain unconnected to each other, they do have relationships in common to a mutually connected third party – the hub. Depicted in Fig. 9 as the central dot connected to the peripheral fragments by the green ‘spokes’, the hub has enormous network importance and influence, as well as great potential as a ‘network weaver’, helping information and social assets flow from one fragment to another, and, as a shared connection, acting as a possible ‘bridge’ to bring otherwise separated groups and individuals into contact.

Although the Cranford social network is more complex and fragmented than this idealised model, it does contain some similarities. The local Housing Association was a commonly cited community asset in the local survey, and its network position is akin to a partial hub. Some fragments of the Cranford network, including some social isolated individuals with few if any other social connections, are connected by spokes to the shared hub of the Housing Association (see Fig. 3 on page 21, above).

It is worth reiterating at this point that the networks survey in Cranford was recording only the self-reported social connections cited by research respondents as being particularly notable or important to them18. In reality, as the major landlord in the neighbourhood and the provider of a range of other services, from gas boiler maintenance checks to responsible dog ownership events,

17 Ibid. p7 18 ‘Important’ to the extent that they cited them in a doorstep survey which asked particular questions about different kinds of relationships: see Appendix for the full list of questions.

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the Housing Association has an even greater reach than this survey suggests. Its potential to act as the network weaving hub in the area, bridging together the scattered fragments, is therefore significant. It is likely that any successful ‘platform’ activity that aims to diversify networks and allow for new connections to take place around partnership and collaboration will need to involve the Housing Association as a key network weaving partner.

Fig. 10: Multi-Hub Small World Network19

If the hub is able to act as a successful network weaver, bring the diverse fragments and sub-communities into meaningful contact with each other to enable them to form social connections with each other, a more mature network phase begins to emerge. In a Multi-Hub Small World Network, new hubs emerge between newly linked communities, with the older hub now developing a role more akin to a ‘network facilitator’ rather than a lone weaver. In the Cranford context, these secondary hubs may include – but should not be limited to – the various sub-communities identified in the social networks analysis on page 20, including the local church, the Hub (library), and some of the individuals connected to the Tenants and Residents Association and church community. These sub-communities’ good will and conscious participation in the networking project will be essential in transitioning towards a Multi-Hub network in which new hubs other than the housing provider are shared by many in the local community. Unless pro-actively

19 Ibid. p.14

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encouraged and co-produced, such multi-hub networking is unlikely to emerge spontaneously.

Because of the different kinds of network typologies we have identified in Cranford, a transition towards a Multi-Hub Small World Network phase could have dramatic and diverse benefits. As different sub-communities and differently isolated individuals begin to connect through the network hub, they would benefit each other not only through the increased social capital of their newly shared connection, but through a kind of network reciprocity, each gaining from the other what is lacked in their own network and supplying the missing links in the network that the other typology lacks.

For instance, the Locally Isolated Individuals with numerous unconnected social contacts (page 25, above), may have access to large numbers of the ‘weak ties’ between distantly-connected groups and individuals that can give rise to new opportunities, information and ideas.20 What they tend to lack, especially in times of crisis or difficulty, is the resilience provided by local strong ties of close social contacts who know one another and can provide social support in local situations. Conversely, the Socially Isolated Groups (p. 26, above), do have access to these local strong ties, but lack the opportunities to receive and disseminate ideas and information through weak ties, as examined in the previous chapter. When groups or individuals fitting these typologies become connected through shared hubs, the Locally Isolated Individuals should benefit from their new strong connections in the local area, while the Socially Isolated Groups benefit from their new access to the diverse contacts and weak ties provided by the Locally Isolated Individuals’ wider networks, as modelled in Figs. 11a and 11b, overleaf:

20 Gronvetter, Mark S., (1973) ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, American Journal of Sociology, Volume 78, Issue 6, pp.1360-80

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Fig. 11a: the networks of Cranford’s Locally Isolated Individuals and members of Socially Isolated Groups.

Fig. 11b: The formerly unconnected networks of the Locally Isolated Individual and the member of the Socially Isolated Group have been joined by a single new strong tie, represented as the thick blue line. The new assumed or potential weak ties are depicted as narrow green lines.

Repeated many times through the newly emerging hubs of relationships held in common between formerly fragmented groups, the network in Krebs and Holley’s model eventually begins to resemble the ideal ‘Core-Periphery’ phase:

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Fig. 12: The ideal ‘Core-Periphery’ network phase21

In this ideal target model, most members of the community are positioned within the ‘core’ of the network, sharing many connections in common with each other, and benefitting from the resilient mix of strong and weak ties they have access to within this core. Meanwhile, this core is not socially isolated in the way that Cranford’s Socially Isolated Groups were previously; the core has access to the ‘open, porous boundary’ of the community’s periphery, and so retaining the benefits of new weak ties, connections to other parts of society, and diverse sources of social capital. In Krebs and Holley’s analysis, this periphery should consist of people who are new to the community and working their way towards the core, bridges to other communities elsewhere, and unique resources operating outside of the community. In the Cranford context, these nodes in the periphery might consist of employers based outside of the immediate Meadows area, the retained contacts from further afield of those formerly Locally Isolated Individuals who are now better connected to others in the locality, and individuals or groups linked to resources with wider catchment areas that the community shares with other communities, such as local churches, parks, or other community institutions and public services.

21 Krebs and Holley (2006): p.16

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Ways Forward

We hope that this report has provided some insight into low wellbeing and the different kinds of social isolation in one area of Hounslow. In the present context of austerity from central government and squeezed budgets for most public services and local government, these issues are of pressing urgency.

Ways forward will need to be co-produced with residents, as social value cannot simply be ‘delivered’ by traditional public services – at any time and perhaps especially with thinned resources. A network of local public agencies, institutions, residents, formal and informal networks will need to cooperate in order to provide a thicker social context that enables networks to increase their social capital, and participants within these networks to enjoy greater wellbeing.

The above insight has, though, already provided some directions for future travel that can help to start these conversations. The common themes suggest that the following approaches may be fruitful avenues for further exploration with residents and other stakeholders:

Clearer pathways to services and amenities

• Mapping the local system and clear signposting to local assets and resources as part of a strategic refocus for certain services – such as those relating to housing and carer support – to be more preventative in their approach. Earlier interventions or better dissemination of their processes could avoid some of the acute crises depicted in the ethnographic sections of this report.

• ‘Concierge services’ in hub locations to bring information about public services closer to the community.

• ‘The Hub’ – a council-maintained library and community centre – was one location notable in the social network analysis for being a resource used by some individuals with few or no other connections, and by those who were ‘struggling’. How could the Hub be used to maximise its network value? By basing the co-location or outreach of local service information there, or by making more use of it for a ‘whole community’ hub with events aimed at the general local population to bring different people into contact with each other?

• Working with housing providers to realise maximum social value from housing officers and other staff who have contact with otherwise isolated residents and groups. This could include information-sharing between social services and housing professionals, or by employing staff from housing providers to take on networking responsibilities, working with isolated residents to help remove blockers to their capability to take part in the local community.

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• Training ‘community champions’ who can help to take information and advice about local services into the community through peer networks. Co-location of advice and information services with popular facilities such as parent and child clubs or community cafes may be another way forward, as well as co-produced mobility and transport solutions or social prescribing.

Social connection building

• For those who lack local social connections, befriending services or well-advertised, co-produced social groups may be of use.

• Working with housing providers to realise maximum social value from housing officers and other staff who have contact with otherwise isolated residents and groups. This could include information-sharing between social services and housing professionals, or by employing staff from housing providers to take on networking responsibilities, working with isolated residents to help remove blockers to their capability to take part in the local community.

• Linking the scattered fragments of the community through hubs and network weavers in order that different network typologies supply the ‘missing links’ to benefit other typologies.

Disruption and networking

• ‘Platforms’, as advocated by Civic Systems Lab22 may be key to the above approaches. Platforms are solutions that provide a context where multiple partners come together to solve numerous problems rather than attempting to deliver a set remedy for a set outcome. Examples like tool libraries, men’s sheds and mixed-use community hubs provide a platform for new connections to emerge while solutions to other problems are worked out. The trained community researchers who participated in this research project, as well as the highly connected activists discovered in the social networks analysis, may play important roles in this co-production process.

Specific local factors to bear in mind

The above suggestions could provide fruitful directions of travel if developed in the Cranford context. Additionally, some local findings and correlations revealed by the wellbeing and networks surveys in the area should be borne in mind when designing new interventions, including:

22 http://www.slideshare.net/JoostBeunderman/civic-systemslab-platforms

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• People working part time scored significantly worse scores for the Life Stress factor of wellbeing. The additional struggles of those who are working part time should be considered in designing new approaches to networking, wellbeing or public services in the area.

• The more social connections reported by a research participant, the more ‘useful’ they reported feeling. This points towards the potential cumulative benefits of approaches that increase the likelihood of new social connections, pointed towards greater personal capacity and resilience as they benefit from richer personal networks. This extra capacity, in contrast to the difficulties experienced by those who are ‘struggling’ could help to generate further social capital and social value in the community.

• In addition to the lack of ‘diversity’ outlined above, in terms of the lack of bridging connections between network fragments, other kinds of diversity are also lacking across the local social network. A high proportion of the existing social connections in the area are within homogenous ethnic, geographical, kinship and socio-economic groupings:

• 74.78% of all social connections reported in our survey were to people of the same ethnicity as the respondent, with 16.09% of connections to people of a different ethnicity (the remaining percentage were connections either to institutions rather than people, or to people whose ethnicity was not disclosed by the respondent).

• 44.81% of all social connections were to people related to the respondent.

• 46.31% of connections were to people also living in the Meadows estate, and 62.52% to people living within Hounslow Borough.

• Different employment types are not evenly distributed across the network; people with ‘A’ classification occupations associated only with others in ‘A’ jobs, or with those who are economically inactive, while those in manual work associated primarily with others in the same category, the economically inactive or the unemployed. Not a single connection within the Meadows estate was to a person in an ‘A’ occupation23.

• The most commonly cited social connections were to Places for People (the local social housing provider), the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, churches (combined), the internet, local

23 NRS social grade classication

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council, and numerous named private individuals. See the Annex for more detail.

With new potential areas of change and difficulty on the horizon for local public service delivery organisations, such as the forthcoming introduction of Universal Credit and the Care Act 2014 that advocates integration of services, it is an opportune moment for public services to consider what factors of wellbeing and social isolation might be points of concern as they plan their activities. The chart overleaf offers a potential framework for deliverers of public services and other local stakeholders to consider which elements of their client base may experience the different factors of wellbeing, in what ways they might be isolated, and to consider what kind of approaches may be appropriate to provide a platform to co-produce solutions.

Table overleaf:

The table overleaf stands as both a summary of some of the key points in this report, with suggested routes for how to think about translating these into action. The table details the broad typologies of isolation that individuals coming into contact with various public services may experience, as well as the typical assets they might have access to. The kinds of approaches that may help are outlined, as well as specific examples that these could look like in practice. These examples are illustrative only, and intended as starting points for discussion rather than firm recommendations for the project board.

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Annex 1 - ethnographic cases

Struggling and withdrawing

Mrs F.

I first visited Mrs F’s maisonette during the course of our door-to-door surveying. There was rubbish heaped up outside the front door, with flies buzzing around in the heat. She took a long time to come to the door, shouted at me through the door to establish who I was, and unlocked several bolts and deadlocks before talking to me through a tiny crack in the door. Before I had even finished explaining the purpose of the interview, she interjected - ‘I hate it. I want to move.’

There followed a long list of sometimes vague complaints about her neighbours, and allegations that Asian people ‘abuse’ and ‘threaten’ her. She had previously been a carer for her disabled husband, and said that since he died some years previously, ‘I’ve got no-one. Everyone just abuses me.’ She did not name a single social connection in her social networks interview.

She is a high user of emergency public services; she said that she very regularly calls the ambulance when she feels unwell, and calls the police when she feels threatened by people outside her home. ‘They’ve banned me from calling the police again’, she explained, ‘They said I’ve called too much, so next time I’ll just die.’ However she does not appear to be in contact with any more preventative services; regarding carers and social workers she said, ‘I don’t want anyone coming around and bothering me’, and on social groupings she commented, ‘I don’t need a day centre - my day centre is me and my cat in my room.’

When I called at Mrs F’s maisonette again a few days later, she shouted, ‘What? Who is it?’, before peering at me through the letterbox. I asked if she’d like to speak to me more about some of the themes we’d covered before. ‘No. No!’, she said.

‘Would you like me to go away?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she replied.

Mrs B.

Mrs B called me upon receiving a letter about the research, to say that there was ‘no point’ in researchers visiting her as she ‘had nothing positive to say, and never see anybody or have anything to do with anyone’. I was able to persuade her that we were interested in her perspective, and we agreed to meet at her home.

She has been very frail since a fall three years ago, and rarely leaves her first floor flat. She relies on her next door neighbour, a young east African woman, to do her weekly online shopping. She is grateful for this help, but is ‘bitter’ about the fact that she is reliant on one person, feeling that she has little to no support from public

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services. She says she receives regular letters to arrange hospital appointments, but on each occasion she has to arrange for her own ambulance transfer, as the hospital’s system hasn’t noted that she requires transport. She says she is on the doctor’s system for dial-a-ride shopping, ‘but nothing ever happens.’ Her anger and upset at this ‘neglect’ is so acute that she feels alienated from society, as she says:

‘I’m neglected by services. I feel sorry for myself. I worked hard all my life and now I get nothing - I have sour grapes... The Muslim lady next door is lovely. She buys my shopping online. She introduced herself when she moved here. She’s a lifeline and I worry about what would happen if she moved away.

‘I feel like a foreigner in my own country. I’m an English woman in my own country and it takes a Somali woman next door to give me any of the help I need.’

Mrs B also tells me that she feels stigmatised by other people in the local area, which she attributes to the fact that she had a black husband (twenty years deceased). She says that this prejudice discourages her from going out in public and engaging with people socially; she says that people look at her on the bus, talk about her behind her back, and one man physically attacked her some years ago. She says:

‘It makes me a recluse. I’m used to it, but I don’t like it. People like me are frightened of others. I don’t smile or say hello to people. When I encounter people, I wait to see what they will do.’

Though I knocked on her door many times after this meeting, called her phone and left notes, I didn’t hear from her again apart from on one occasion when she told me through the letterbox that she wasn’t feeling well enough to see to see me.

Mrs I

Mrs I was surveyed by a community researcher and gave answers indicating very low wellbeing, so I visited again for a more extended interview. Her attitude and demeanour were of anger and exasperation with all manner of grievances. Her only social contact is with her adult son, who she sees rarely. She perceives an acute lack of neighbourliness, saying that she used to cook extra food for her neighbours but received no kindness in return, and so stopped doing this: ‘There’s no community’, she says. She sees local networks and institutions as unhelpful, inaccessible cliques: the Residents’ Association ‘aren’t helpful, but they get priority treatment for themselves.’ The members of a local older people’s social club she went to once ‘talk too much - yak yak yak! I couldn’t say anything or understand anything, so I never went back.’ The housing association don’t prune the trees regularly enough and the wet leaves get slippery, meaning she’s afraid to walk outside: ‘I fell and knocked myself out once and I’m worried about falling again so I never go anywhere’, she said. The communal light outside her house has been broken for some time; the Housing Association haven’t fixed it

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despite her requests, and her neighbours aren’t interested in supporting her complaint, so she has given up: ‘I say fine I don’t care anymore, I just won’t go out when it’s dark.’ Men playing football on the grass outside her house have broken her plant pots for the second year running, despite her asking them to play somewhere else, ‘So next year I won’t put any flowers out to make it look nice.’

Her complaints tumble one after the other, with barely a breath in between, with an irritable but resigned tone as if she has said it all before and is tired of discussing it. Everything she says indicates that she is withdrawing, giving up: she won’t risk walking across the leaves any more, she’ll stay in at night instead of trying to persuade somebody to fix the light, and she won’t make a flower garden next year because of the footballers. Though we speak for around an hour, she conducts the entire interview with her hand on the door as if about to slam it shut. She is consciously, rapidly withdrawing from society, and there is reason to expect that, had we undertaken this research next year instead of this year, she would not have opened the door to speak to us in the first place.

Socially Isolated groups: Contrasting Family

Narratives:

Frances and Michael are engaged members of the community. They

know many people on the estate and take care to speak to people

as they pass through. Frances works as a child-minder while Michael

brings in money as a part-time decorator and is often called upon by

elderly neighbours for help with tasks around the house. They have

been in the estate almost 20 years, arriving shortly after their first

son was born. Since then their family has flourished; they now have

four children and six grandchildren. What is more, to both her and

her husband’s delight, they all live locally on the estate. While

Francis and Michael continue to live in their two bedroom house,

their extended family occupy a further five properties on the estate.

During the summer months Frances’s house becomes a focal point

for both her family and other local families. Her door is often found

open and her grandchildren play in and outside of the house.

Frances takes pleasure in this situation and is proud of her efforts in

making it happen, in particular her knowledge of the process of

gaining a property on the estate. During her time on the estate

there have been many different routes, or streams, that a person

could get a socially let house or flat. In particular she has fought for

the importance of the ‘community’ stream that allows families to

stay together as they grow, providing affordable housing on the

estate as new relationships lead to new babies.

This strength can now be found in the children. They all reflect quiet

happiness in their situation on the estate. All are working or are full

time parents and all feel comfortable and happy on the estate,

knowing that their friends and family are near. This sounds like an

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estate success story; family comes to the estate, thrives and remains

connected.

Not all families manage to realise their own needs, or desires, as

effectively as Frances and Michael. For George and Margaret the

story is tragically different, although it has been corroborated from

several sources by people outside their immediate family. Much like

the previous family, they arrived on the estate over two decades

ago. Moving west from high-rise estates closer to the center of

London, they both welcomed the green, leafy atmosphere of the

newly built outer London estate with their baby boy.

Unlike Frances and Michael, this couple had a much smaller family

and raised their son on the estate. Frank, their son, grew up with

some social difficulties; he was a ‘drinker’ and a ‘nuisance’ according

to other residents. The family stuck together in the same house as

he reached adulthood, finding mutual support by keeping the family

close under one roof; he lived with his parents to mitigate some of

his social problems and as the years passed Frank became the main

earner in the household and would pay the rent and bills as his

parents retired. Later George and Margaret developed severe ill

health and during this difficult time Frank attempted, and

unfortunately failed, to officially take over the rent of their family

home. After the death of his parents, Frank was left in an untenable

situation in the flat and found himself forcibly evicted. Homeless,

Frank spent some time sleeping in the estate’s bin sheds for shelter,

before leaving the estate for good. Apparently, the last anybody on

the estate heard of him, he was living in a hostel in a neighbouring

London borough.

‘Sam & Jane’ - Spinning plates: struggling to make

things better

At times life on the estate can seem like a full-time job - especially when you don’t have a job. This feeling of being multiply troubled can be heightened in the heat of summer, when bored children plague your few peaceful moments between trying to fend off debt collectors and obtain food from the local charities, all while trying to make sense of the new housing exchange system online. Far from the media image of the lazy parent sitting on the sofa, much of these days are filled with the stress of keeping various plates spinning, each one is important and each could bring significant trauma if it should fall.

One such plate-spinning-couple are Jane and Sam. Mother of four Jane has lived on the estate since her mother brought her here as a small child. Her boyfriend, Sam, is dedicated to his children but has struggled to find work. When he does he struggles to keep it due to mental and physical health problems. Jane is the driving force for the family. She manages to keep her children clothed and fed, and the rent paid by balancing benefits with weekly visits to the food bank at

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the church in Hounslow West. Her schedule is chaotic and mostly without routine - often more reactive than proactive. This hardly lends itself to organising time to speak to a researcher and there were many failed attempts to spend time with this troubled Mum.

The flat’s buzzer sounds and after a brief gap Jane answers sounding more than a little stressed:

‘Hello! Who is it?’ In the background her children clamor with interest about the visitor. With resigned acceptance at the memory of the agreed meeting, she accepts another plate to spin and pushes the button to let me in while returning to another task, tending to the newest addition to the family - now just 10 weeks old. The chaos of the house is clear and the floor is strewn with discarded toys, piled up clean clothes and paperwork. By the door one piece of paper is headed with clear, bold, red writing - it does not bode well for Jane and represents another plate to spin back into place, if she can. As I enter the flat she shouts over my shoulder to rein in one of her children who is scooting further away down the balcony than he is allowed. She smiles, but explains to me that now isn’t a good time for an interview:

‘I’m trying to deal with the gas man, we have been cut off. We were on the way to the high street to sort out when I got a call to say he was here so we had to come back. I’m ok - stressed - trying to keep the kids quiet and out of the way so I can sort it.’

Instead, we arrange that I will accompany her to the food bank the next morning, offering an extra pair of hands to carry back the shopping.

When the morning comes, we have difficulties meeting up. She sends me a text message to explain that she’ll be late as she and the baby overslept. An hour later, I get another text saying that they have already left without me, but that if I hurry I can catch them up. As I run into town to meet her, I get a phonecall:

‘Sorry - I am running back now. The bailiffs are at the door. A neighbour called - I have to run back and I won’t be able to go to the foodbank today. Which is rubbish as I was going to pick up food for a friend as well!’

Her mum takes the kids to the park to keep them out of the way in case of a nasty scene with the bailiffs. Although Sam is at the flat, the bailiff has only just managed to wake him - Jane is furious that he let them inside: ‘He is such a child sometimes - he just doesn’t know how to deal with things like debt and bailiffs!’ Dealing with bailiffs, for her, is a commonplace part of adult life.

Sam is father to two of the youngest children and although he has many of the responsibilities of an adult he has struggled to take on the mantle. His is tall and healthy looking, yet this belies a history of mental and physical health problems made worse by past drug and alcohol use. Such experiences have left him lacking confidence, with

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a fear of failure that has made him reluctant to seek out job opportunities. Recently, much to the delight of Jane and Sam alike, he has found some work. The job will be cash-in-hand which suits Sam as it means he won’t have to sign a contract he neither understands nor feels confident about fulfilling. Sam and Jane’s out-of-work benefits constitute the family’s livelihood, and launching into a full time job while his confidence is so low feels like a high-risk act for Sam. When he can not guarantee this ‘casual’ work will become more permanent, and when he fears that his own insecurities may make it fall apart, doing things more officially could jeopardise the family’s safety net.

This opportunity of cash-in-hand employment is casual enough to ease Sam back into the ‘working life’. It is a chance to develop his skills and build his struggling confidence. Regardless of the legality of this ‘off the books’ arrangement, Sam needs to work for both his mental health and the wellbeing of his family.

Now Sam and Jane are concerned about the possibility of the Jobcentre finding out too soon about his forays into working life, and the possible benefits sanctions that could follow. But, given the time and space to be encouraged in his new endeavour and allowed the opportunity to develop confidence in his ability to hold a job and provide for his children, he could be empowered to help himself and Jane move from a ‘Vulnerable but Struggling’ pattern of coping into more of an ‘Improving / Resilient’ pattern. In time it could lead to something more concrete that he and his family can rely on and can ultimately remove them from benefits altogether.

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‘Sarah and Jon’ – Struggling and falling through the

cracks

Bureaucratic complications and unexpected shocks can bring the vulnerability of struggling people’s situation into sharp focus, and dramatically throwing an individual from a Resilient pattern of coping to a much more troubled one.

Central to Sarah and Jon’s life are the problems with Sarah’s health. She was a trained carer until ten years ago when osteoporosis left her right leg permanently unusable and shifted her from being a carer to being in need of care. Alongside her mobility issues, Sarah also has a range of other complications including cardiopulmonary disease, emphysema and asthma. Her ailing health means that each day begins with Jon helping her to remove the build-up of matter in her lungs - a long and painful process that halts the start of her day by hours.

Alongside the medication for her other conditions, she takes up to 60mg of morphine in regular small doses throughout the day. The drugs leave her feeling ‘zombified’ and unable to communicate as she would like. To add to the complication Sarah no longer feels safe taking some with her on journeys to the the high street because ‘other people can be attracted to the chair - they know what I might have’. Despite the final 20 mg dose at bedtime, sleep is often hard to come by as she struggles between coughing and feeling sick from her medication. Jon has recently given up his warehouse job to address Sarah’s day-to-day needs, and his application to be her registered full time carer is with the benefits office.

For the past few years, Sarah has been using a mobility scooter to get her around. The scooter has been of unquestionable importance to her, allowing her to maintain a diverse group of friends outside the estate and spend leisure time ‘nipping up the high street for a bit of shopping, the odd pint and something to eat in the local Yates’’. On one such trip, they bumped into no less that seven different people they knew by name - including Jon’s mother. These visits are important to all concerned, yet they have hit significant barriers of late.

Some months ago Sarah had an operation for an illness in her eye. Although she was informed that the the surgery would leave her without sight in her eye for a few weeks, she was reassured that this would return. It didn’t, and to date the hospital has failed to provide her with follow-up appointments to address the issue. While the loss of eyesight in one eye complicates everyday tasks, it is the accompanying loss of mobility that has affected her the most. Her reduced vision has meant that her mobility scooter has been taken away from her. Bereft of transport and limited only to movement around her home, with crutches, she has attempted to get a wheelchair. Her requests to the hospital, doctors and local private company that supplied the scooter have all turned up

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short. Sarah has been left to find, and fund, a mobility solution for herself.

On a later visit Jon is quick to display a new acquisition - a second hand wheelchair, only £30. Although this represents the first chance that Sarah would have had to leave the house in months, she remains hesitant, and perhaps for good reason. The seat is torn and much of the lining looks ready to split and she is cautious: a fall will cause her a lot of pain. Regardless, the chair has arrived just in time - the very next day Sarah’s benefit payment has failed to materialise and a call to Jobcentre Plus has confirmed that the payment has been suspended as of a week previously.

Though they have some food in the cupboard, enough for dinner and perhaps breakfast, neither of them have any money for essentials. They wait, nervously, for a call to explain the problem. When it finally comes, it is not good news. It appears that Jon’s application to become Sarah’s carer has blocked her payments. As part of the application, Jon would start to receive the payments for both of them, allowing him to collect the benefits on her behalf. Yet another piece of paperwork accepting this shift has not been completed - the payments have stopped to Sarah, but Jon has not received his yet. There is a gap in the system, and it seems that Jon and Sarah have fallen right through it.

Neither Sarah nor Jon quite understand how this has happened and although they gained some advice from the JobCentre Plus call centre, this extra form was never mentioned. A visit to the branch in the high street is required to find out what they can do about it and if they can get some much needed cash in the mean time. The wheelchair is hurriedly strapped together with frayed rope and the pair head to Hounslow town centre. With no money for buses this is a 45 minute walk away for Jon, and a painfully bumpy ride for Sarah. Although she is registered with the London based dial-a-ride, Sarah has struggled to secure a place on the bus when she needs one and when she does, Jon is unable to come join her because, as yet, he is not a registered carer.

When we arrive at the Job centre after a tiring and, for Sarah, painful journey, the large glass doors slide to the side and we are confronted with three smart looking men, two assistants and one security guard standing in front of the lift entrance. There are no desks here, no seats, no place to wait - just a queue to speak to one of the men. When their time comes, they are both articulate in their description of the problem and quickly make themselves understood. Rather than Sarah’s benefits being shifted automatically to Jon, with the acceptance of his carer status, instead the benefits were simply frozen. Sarah and Jon are sanguine about the bureaucratic issues and the assistant is fast to point out that it was probably the poor advice they received from the call centre (‘another building, not this one’) that was to blame.

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The problem is compounded further as since Sarah’s benefits have been cancelled her long term status as receiving aid has also stopped. This makes gaining a ‘crisis loan’ more difficult as she is no longer, officially, ‘on benefits’. There is hope and the assistant provides the right forms to correct the problem. Although he is unable to provide them with any money now for essentials like food and bus fares, he does explain that this might be possible at the Civic Centre. This building is another 20 minute walk away.

Art the Civic Centre they are met by another assistant who provides them with another form. This form is a direct request for ‘urgent aid’ and requires a full history of details on health, benefits and a detailed account of how much is needed and for what. Each extra item on the form feels like a further assault, pushing their patience and demanding proof of their need. Somewhere, in reach of the people within this building, or through the infrastructure of the internet, is all of the information needed to prove Sarah and Jon with the money they are due, and that they urgently need.

Sarah’s eyesight stops her completing the form herself, and as Jon sets his mind to the task she blends helping him with details and telling me about her morning routine, taking morphine and clearing out her lungs (the following is a transcript of the conversation from this point):

Sarah - …It takes [me] about two or three hours to function. When I wake up in the morning I just start coughing.

Jon - Like an old man… National Insurance Number?

She reels off the numbers from memory, without hesitation, and continues:

Sarah - ‘ ...Sometimes I have to lay flat and he gets a towel on my back and kind of just pats it. Sometimes I sit over a bowl of steam and try and loosen it that way.

Jon [reading from the form] - Do you have a partner?!

Sarah - Ha! Last time I looked. They will want to know what I had for breakfast next!

Her hands are shaking and, despite her smile, her voice cracks:

Sarah - It will calm down soon. After a few hours - it is just the stress.

Jon [getting irritable with the form’s questions when their need is so obvious and acute] - ‘What do you need and why do you need it?’... We need food! ‘Why?’...survival.

Sarah - It’s bloody terrible. I don’t eat much but if I don’t have something I can’t take the morphine. I did it once and I just passed out for two hours. Sometimes the morphine stops me breathing when I sleep. He has to wake me up.

Jon - ‘Is the need related to a medical condition and has that condition been assessed by a medical practitioner’ - Yes. You can’t take your morphine without food.

Sarah - It’s the way they write the questions. I don’t understand sometimes.

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Jon - ‘Do you or your partner receive any other benefits?’

Sarah - Disability living allowance. You see I got that yesterday but since I thought I was getting more today I used nearly all of it to pay the water and gas bills. I still have to pay bedroom tax as my daughter was living with me. Now she is at Uni studying Health and Social care for disabled people - but I have to pay £30 every fortnight. I worked out my bills were, today, £180. We are trying to convince his mum to come and stay so we can share the costs. But she is in sheltered accommodation. Set in her old ways.

Jon - I have brain ache. ‘Do you or your partner have any other income?’

Sarah - If we had another income we WOULDN’T BE HERE.

Jon - Council tax… now how much is that?

Sarah - £15… he is getting stressed now.

Jon calls out the various bills to Sarah and she tells him each value to the pound, and when they are due. When he asks how much they spend on clothes she just laughs:

Sarah - It is lucky I have a good friend who is the same size as me. She is also a size 6 waist[...] You would think since I am not mobile enough that I would be massive. I take after my mum…

Sarah’s mood drops. She stares at her hands as she considers her ill health:

Sarah - My mum died at the age of 43, my dad at the age of 42. I’m 42 now. She died of emphysema and he died of cancer. The cancer started in his nose, and just spread everywhere. He was a big man, 42 waist and he went down to a 28. In two months. I used to care for my Dad as he died. I did it on crutches. I have to do everything on those crutches now - even when I have a shower. He helps me sometimes, but I don’t always want the help. Sometimes I just want to do it myself.

Jon laughs at something he is reading.

Sarah - What? What’s so funny?

Jon - Just some of these questions: ‘Do you, your partner, or a member of your household, suffer from health issues?’ - Nah… [they both laugh].

‘Ellen’ – The Active Struggle

‘I kicked off. I said: ‘Don’t you think I’d want to work if I could? Do you think I like my life? I’m not rubbish.’’ (Ellen - in interview)

Ellen, a middle aged woman living alone with numerous physical and mental health difficulties, exemplifies the struggle of experiencing low wellbeing as much as anybody we spoke to for this study. During the period of the research she experienced difficulties with social situations and reported a recent, lengthy

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crisis resulting from the withdrawal of various benefit payments. I accompanied her during her weekly schedule of appointments as she negotiates the complex world of food banks, soup kitchens, mental health drop in centres and other state and community services.

I first met Ellen at a local cafe where she regularly ate lunch. he initiated a conversation from the next table, launching into an account of how the area ‘often doesn’t feel safe’ and that she regularly feels ‘threatened’. She later gave extremely low wellbeing scores upon completing our survey - some of the very lowest in our entire sample - and we resolved to try to reconnect with her for more in-depth ethnographic work. When we next met, a chance encounter in the street, she explained that she had stopped going to the cafe after having an argument with the staff. The manager had mentioned that other customers had been ‘complaining’ about her. She alleged that he referred to her by a ‘derogatory name’ that prompted her to ‘kick off’: sweeping cutlery onto the floor and throwing ketchup bottles at the walls, shouting and challenging the owner to go outside to fight. She recalled that he tried to ‘buy her off’ with a free cup of tea but she refused, threatened to throw the tea at him,storming out ‘before anyone called the police’. Since then, she had been going to a different cafe where she is ‘left in peace’ while she eats.

This dramatic public spectacle was not, apparently, a one off event in Ellen’s life, and ‘kicking off’ is a recurrent theme in our conversations:

‘Oh I usually kick off there [a drop-in centre]! Last time I’d written on my carrier bag ‘these are my lemons - do not touch’ - but somebody stole them. I kicked off… I was like ‘RIGHT!’ and pulled the thing [light switch/electric cable - she gestures violently yanking something at shoulder-height] out of the wall so they all had to stop.’

Later, she recalls a period in which she had to regularly attend meetings and sign on at the Job Centre:

‘When they said they’d stop all my benefits, I kicked off, I said: ‘Don’t you think I’d work if I could? Do you think I like my life? Have you any idea what it’s like to live with depression? I’m not rubbish. I just can’t work. I’d kick off every single time but they never called the police. It got to the stage where the security [guards] would say ‘Hello Ellen!’ and escort me in and wait there while I had my meeting in case I kicked off and then escort me out like I was the Queen! [She laughs]. I always kicked off but they never did anything, because they felt sorry for me, they could see how frustrated I was.’

If there is an element of enjoyment in the way she recounts these chaotic episodes, and to an extent welcoming the attention she receives, there is also much that is troubling and indicative of the frequent struggles in her day-to-day life. There is the suggestion of a familiarity with the police, a preparedness for violence, and a flirtation with the boundaries of criminal damage.. The awareness

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that others had ‘complained’ about her in the cafe and the insistence that her money ‘is worth as much as theirs’ and that she is ‘not rubbish’ are indicative of an awareness, or concern, that she is stigmatised and looked down on by others.

It is partly this concern that keeps her on edge; whether her livelihood has been cut by the benefits office or somebody has helped themselves to her fruit. Being on first name terms with security guards who escort her around like the Queen is an amusing anecdote, but it is tiring to erupt so frequently. Sometimes her angry episodes were responses to perceived threats or insults, sometimes petty frustrations or perhaps attempts to draw attention, and sometimes they are responses to genuinely stressful and upsetting situations, such as the dispute over her benefits.

There is also her depression. Ellen recalls that twenty years ago she was ‘fine’ and working full time, but had developed post-natal depression after having children. In her own words:

‘You can’t carry on calling it post-natal depression when the kids are 18 so the doctor just said, ‘You now have depression.’’

On more than one occasion we arranged to meet, only for Ellen to turn me away with a resigned ‘No. Not today. Depression bad.’ She says that bad moods ‘stick’ to her and that ‘anything can bring it on’. She looks tired and has the appearance of somebody who isn’t used to company. Ellen describes talking to people she doesn’t know as a ‘hassle’; she tends to sit alone or with a volunteer whom she knows and trusts.

She attends an array of these ‘drop-ins’ and I meet her a number of times at a weekly ‘cafe’ cum food bank service run by a local church. She started attending this cafe after hearing about it at a monthly dinner run by the same church. Each week, after the cafe, she heads into town afterwards to do some shopping before going to a separate ‘mental health drop in’ the same afternoon. I ask her if there are any other such social groups she attends, and she recounts a detailed schedule. Like a senior executive rattling off her engagements for the week, Ellen lists the many different places she goes to for free food and social support. Her demeanour brightens as she shares this overview and she takes evident pride in her detailed knowledge of the area’s services that helps her obtain free hot meals:

‘Yeah well there was a dinner over at another church in Richmond that started up again yesterday night after a break for the summer, I went to that. and there’s a soup kitchen over at West Ealing on Saturdays and Sundays I go to when I’m not at this church’s Sunday dinner. And when you go to soup kitchens other people there tell you about other ones and you go there as well….

‘… I don’t actually come to this church because it isn’t my spiritual home, I go to the church in West Ealing. But yeah there’s always soup kitchens and homeless dinners you can go to at churches, and food banks.

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I don’t use the food bank at this church because I can’t carry the stuff home because it hurts my back which makes my depression worse - I use the council food box because they deliver it. So there’s always ways of finding food, so you won’t go hungry.’

In spite of her bad back which limits her mobility, she strides purposefully out of the door the minute the cafe closes, and is half-way up the road towards the train station before I realise she has gone. I catch her up and ask where she’s going, wondering why she wasn’t walking in the other direction to do her weekly shop before the mental health drop-in. She gestures towards her mobile phone ‘I just heard about a soup kitchen in Hanwell, so I’m going to go and check that out’, she replies.

Ellen’s knowledge of these community, council, and church services is remarkable. Her schedule is as busy and complicated as a busy professional. Calculating which Sundays to attend the local church dinner and which to head into Ealing for the soup kitchen, gaining information about other services from her fellow attendees at philanthropic dinners, and picking and choosing the services she makes use of from a range of options. She clearly demonstrates an adaptability and resourcefulness that exemplify the active process that struggling requires. Although her mental and physical wellbeing are poor and she frequently experiences chaotic situations, her financial situation is precarious enough that she is prepared to make a half an hour journey to test out a new resource. There is a restlessness and dynamism present as she negotiates her situation: Strong in character, experienced in fighting her corner and an understanding of her own flaws. She is lonely, depressed, and poor; she told us in her survey that she is often ‘overwhelmed’ and she scored very low in all of our ‘not coping’ metrics of Life Stress, Mental State and Getting By. Despite - or perhaps because of - all this, she is resilient and resourceful.

‘Resourceful’ is the word she uses to describe herself, and she attributes this resourcefulness in part to a difficult period earlier in the year when she had her disability benefits withdrawn pending an assessment - for which she says she had to wait ten months. She describes the difficulties she experienced during this period, and the vicious cycle as the various difficulties compounded each other and made her situation progressively more difficult:

‘When I really struggled was when they cut my benefits. They cut it all and said I had to appeal, which took ten months until March[...] In that time I only had £70 a week coming in, which wasn’t enough for my bills - my phone got cut off. I had nothing.

‘That made me more depressed and I never went anywhere, and when I don’t get exercise my back gets worse which made me even more depressed. I had to get everyone to write letters - my doctor, the lady from the homeless charity, they both said the benefit cut made me more ill and made the problems worse. They put me on JSA and made me sign on and bullied me. It gave me more stress. They said, ‘You can work,

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you must work or we’ll stop all the benefits’ - the JSA, everything[...] I just can’t work. I can’t - I actually had panic attacks in the Job Centre, in the assessment to see if I could work!’

In her account, the time that she ‘really struggled’ was when ‘they’ - the bureaucratic services that she feels are supposed to help her - caused a shock to her routine and ability to cope. As with the case with Sarah and Jon (above), the sudden withdrawal of a resource dramatically altered Ellen’s pattern of coping, highlighting the precarious line between the ‘Vulnerable but Struggling’ and ‘Multiply Troubled’ patterns. The benefit cut - aside from the obvious financial impact - sparked numerous problems as the stress of the situation fed into her depression and a vicious synergistic spiral of her worsening depression and back pain.

And yet still this struggle is active, as she mobilised her existing resources - the social capital of her doctor and a contact from the homeless charity, as well as her own strength of character and determination to argue her cause - to eventually achieve her desired outcome. The assessment concluded that she should have her benefits restored and backdated. It was during this period that she became more adept at sourcing free food and social support through the various services, dinners and drop-in centres she still frequents, as well as learning skills at a ‘benefits workshop’ that she has since passed on to others in similar situations.

The way she talks about the benefits workshop is illustrative of both sides of the struggle - the difficulty and the resourcefulness:

‘It was hard to make myself get there because of the pain and depression, but I saw it as an investment to get the money. We laughed - we called it ‘cheating’ but they called it ‘tools’ - the tools to pass the assessment. But if it’s cheating it’s not scamming because it’s money you need and you have to work the system and speak the right language so they know, so they can’t fail you. When you fill in forms you have to use long words - I use words like ‘exacerbate’ - because if you don’t give them the detail they won’t give you the money. If you can’t go to the toilet, you have to tell them, you can’t be shy about that.’

Her experience is one of pain and having to force herself to do things because of her difficulty in getting around and keeping appointments, and of being prepared for the humiliation of presenting a certain image of herself before the authorities, even including details of going to the toilet. But her response is active - she invests in the benefits workshop and learns to ‘work the system’ to her eventual advantage. She articulates both sides of this struggle:

‘You know what? It made me more depressed but it also made me very resourceful[…]You have to be resourceful.’

Evidence of this resourcefulness abounds. She knows a place that gives her discarded vegetables and chicken skins that she boils up for her dog, and, rather than paying to call the Housing

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Association helpline, she fixes a blocked pipe in her flat by recalling the skills she learned on a DIY course some years ago.

The resourcefulness of the struggle Ellen experiences as part of her experience of low wellbeing could be regarded as assets: from the the thrift and DIY skills to the ability to gain benefit from a complex network of social resources and appointments, to the mutual information sharing between herself and other drop-in attendees about free meals and benefits tips. Her daily life, though slowed by her various troubles (‘I didn’t want to come here today. I had to drag myself here’), consists of a dynamic process of meeting appointments, visiting services, paying debts, accumulating free food, ‘kicking off’, arguing for her needs and swapping information about local resources. At present, however, this capacity is largely wasted, in terms of social productivity. Her struggle results in a mediocre existence, and her impulse to seek out resources and share them with others that could see her, in a different context, sharing her DIY skills with others in need (for example) are instead expended on feeding herself, fighting to retain withdrawn benefits and helping others achieve a similarly modest equilibrium.

Her pattern of coping is similarly dynamic, rapidly fluctuating between ‘Multiply Troubled’, ‘Vulnerable but Struggling’ and ‘Improving/Resilient’, experiencing them all in rapid succession or even simultaneously. Like a Catherine Wheel hurtling through a cycle, such dynamism is not sustainable, with the struggle of meeting multiple troubles with simultaneous vulnerability and resilience hugely demanding of Ellen’s mental and social resources. The resilient impulse that prepares her to argue her case at the Job Centre is the same one that causes her to erupt with public displays of anger and violence. Local services’ crude attempts at cutting costs, such as reassessing her disability benefits, only served to worsen her situation and drive further demand as doctors, charities, food banks, work capability assessors and security guards were called in to engage with a process of which the net-product was negligible as Ellen’s original benefits were reinstated.

Such a struggle and expenditure of capacity will seek an ‘exit’ from the unsustainable passage through different wellbeing patterns. It is possible that some of Ellen’s capacity can be better realised as assets in a more supportive context - but it is perhaps equally likely that the constant struggling will see these capacities depleted, pushing her further towards an entrenched Multiply Troubled pattern of wellbeing.

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Annex 2 - additional Social network

data and analysis

Types of relationships

The types of relationships that people had varied. While over 95% of respondents had some sort of social, support or trust connections – such as somebody that they enjoyed socialising with or somebody that they could discuss problems with – almost 20% of people had nobody who they could talk to about problems, or who they could borrow money from; knowing people locally who had good contacts, such as community activists or people that could organise local events, was the least common form of connection: well over a third of people – 36% - did not know anyone like this.

total number of

times cited

average number of

times cited

People with no connections

of this type

ALL social

connections 735 4.32 4.12%

Social, support

& trust 678 3.99 4.12%

Socialise with 494 2.9 7.06%

Talk about

problems 261 1.53 17.06%

Give practical

help 195 1.15 26.47%

Lend money 230 1.35 17.06%

Good local

contacts 169 0.99 36.47%

The most mentioned people/places/roles for social support/trust:

name

Places for People

CAB

Resident A (anon)

Resident B (anon)

Church

Resident C (anon)

Resident D (anon)

Internet

Resident E (anon)

Doctor

Job Centre

59

The most mentioned people/places/roles that people went to to discuss problems:

Resident A (anon)

Church

CAB

Doctor

Job centre

Resident F (anon)

Resident B (anon)

The most mentioned people/places/roles that people went to for practical help:

name

Resident B (anon)

Resident F (anon)

Resident G (anon)

Resident A (anon)

The most mentioned people/places/roles that people cited as having useful local contacts

name

Places_for_People

Resident A (anon)

Resident C (anon)

church

Resident F (anon)

Resident G (anon)

Resident H (anon)

internet

council

Resident I (anon)

Residents_association

Types of ties

When they answered questions about their social and support networks, respondents were asked who they would go to for a range of social and support needs. The most common type of reported relationship was with people that they enjoyed spending time with. For each person they mentioned, respondents were asked whether that person was the same ethnicity as them, if they were part of the same family, and whether or not they lived locally. The proportions of people’s contacts in each of these criteria are as follows:

Same ethnicity Different ethnicity Not applicable/not given

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74.78% 16.09% 9.13%

Related to them No related to them Not applicable/not given

44.81% 47.98% 7.20%

Lives in Meadows Does not live in Meadows Not applicable/not given

46.31% 45.15% 8.54%

Lives in Hounslow Does not live in Hounslow Not applicable/not given

62.52% 29.52% 8.54%

Where do people go locally?

Respondents were asked if there was anywhere they like going to that helps them feel part of the community.

The most mentioned places that people enjoy going to locally are as follows:

Place (or activity):

Number of respondents

who mentioned it:

Park 21

Church 20

The Hub centre 17

Library 16

High St 10

Mosque 8

Swimming 6

Beaversfield park(public) 6

Local shops 5

Heathrow gym 5

Cinema 4

Pub 4

St Martins church 4

Meadows park/playground 4

Bingo 3

Community centre 3

Central London 3

Football 3

Gym 3

Ermine centre 3

Toddler group 3

Residents association 2

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Community meetings 2

Hounslow health 2

Hounslow central 2

Gurdwara 2

Good Shepherd church 2

We Are One day centre 2

Church in Ealing 2

These community assets, and the connections between them and the respondents who mentioned them, can be visualised as a social network ‘map’ as in the image below:

62

Additional statistical findings and

statistical methodology for wellbeing

factors

Principal Components Analysis of the data was undertaken using Direct Oblimin rotation, extraction using correlation matrix was carried out on twelve items from the survey. The model was extrapolated from Structure Matrix using item/factor loadings of >0.55

The twelve items were:

• ‘How satisfied are you with your life?’

• WEMWEBS 1 ‘I’ve been feeling optimistic about the future’ • WEMWEBS 2 ‘I’ve been feeling useful’ • WEMWEBS 3 ‘I’ve been feeling relaxed’

• WEMWEBS 4 ‘I’ve been dealing with problems well’ • WEMWEBS 5 ‘I’ve been thinking clearly’ • WEMWEBS 6 ‘I’ve been feeling close to other people’ • WEMWEBS 7 ‘I’ve been able to make up my own mind

about things’ • ‘I feel that things have been getting on top of me’ • STRESS [How stressed are you about] debt/finance

• STRESS [How stressed are you about] health • STRESS [How stressed are you about] family life

Three factors were extracted:

• Mental State. Loaded with o ‘How satisfied are you with your life?’ o ‘I’ve been feeling optimistic about the future’ o Useful o ‘I’ve been feeling relaxed’

• Life Stress. Loaded with

o ‘I feel that things have been getting on top of me’ o Debt/finance o Health o Family

• Getting By. Loaded with o ‘I’ve been dealing with problems well’ o I’ve been thinking clearly o I’ve been feeling close to others

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o I’ve been able to make up my own mind about things

Our analysis identified three types of coping: Mental state (MS), Life stress (LS) and feeling Getting by (GB).

These forms of coping seemed evenly distributed across the sample in terms of gender, age and income, although being an ethnicity other than white British was associated with having better ‘mental state’ scores.

Statistical analysis revealed correlations between these coping factors and individual items from the survey, summarized as follows:

Access, independence and life stress

Correlation with mobility answers

• Being a regular user of any service was a significant predictor of lower LS scores, that is, being worse off/having more life stress (U=3.488, p<0.001). It was not a predictor however of MS or GB.

• Having problems with mobility makes day-to day life more difficult and stressful, and this has a knock on effect on state of mind. However, by the lack of relationship with GB, it seems not to affect core resilience-related factors.

• Respondents working part time scored significantly worse on LS than those working full time (U=0.575, p=0.038). In fact, part-time scores on LS were worse than for unemployed people, which was not significantly different to FT employment.

Feeling part of something and mental state:

• All 7 community questions from the survey (questions 8-13 and 16 in the survey, see appendix below) correlated significantly with MS.

• MS correlated with having people that you could spend time with, socially, and having people you might borrow money from

• It also correlated with being mentioned by other people • There is evidence that feeling connected to the local

community is an important factor in feeling supported when you are more physically vulnerable: the number of

64

community ties correlated with feeling stressed about your health

• ‘Feeling useful’ correlated with having contacts who could give social support

Local embeddedness and Getting by:

• (‘How often do you say hello to people in the estate?’, ‘This is an area where people look after each other’, and ‘I feel I belong to something I would call a community’) all correlated with GB.

• Number of years living the estate correlates with GB (Rs=0.21, p=0.02

Other risk factors:

• Health stress : ‘How satisfied are you with your health’ significantly correlated with all three coping factors

o LS – Rs = 0.464, p<0.001 o MS – Rs= 0.278, p=0.002 o GB – Rs= 0.299, p=0.001

• Service use: Being a regular user of any service was a significant predictor of lower LS scores that is, being worse off/having more life stress (U=3.488, p<0.001). It was not a predictor however of MS or GB.

65

Appendix (survey materials)

Stronger Together – Connected Communities Research

INTERVIEWER NAME: ……………………………………………………….

DATE: LOCATION OF INTERVIEW: HOME / PUBLIC VENUE

Project Summary:

• We are interviewing residents to understand the local community and

how it functions.

• We will be talking to residents about their wellbeing (happiness, health,

and quality of life) and their community connections (friends, services

and people they know locally).

• We will then present our work to the local council to discuss what can be

done to make things better.

Participation and data protection:

• You do not have to take part in this research.

• We do not work for Places for People, the council, the job centre, or any

other local services.

• If you volunteer to be in this study, you may cancel at any time without

giving any reasons.

• You can refuse to answer any questions you do not want to answer.

• All information will be stored confidentially and held securely under the

Data Protection Act.

• Any information we include in our reports will be anonymous.

INTERVIEWER: SIGN HERE TO CONFIRM YOU HAVE READ THE ABOVE POINTS

TO THE PARTICIPANT AND THAT HE OR SHE HAS UNDERSTOOD:

…………………………………………………….

66

The Meadows, Hounslow – Stronger Together survey

READ: We will be asking you questions about you, your area, the people you

know and how you feel.

1. You and the Meadows estate:

READ: these first questions are about you and your area

1. What is your full name?:

FIRST NAME:______________ SURNAME:_________

2. Address: 3. Postcode:

3. How long have you lived in this estate/on Beavers Lane/on this road? (Write

in months/years):

_______________

4. Why did you initially move to this estate/Beavers Lane/this road?

5. What places do you like going to locally? These may be places where you do

activities, groups that you take part in, things you do that keep you active, or

that help you feel part of the local area.

Please give specific names if you can.

Prompt: this might be a specific community project, club, church, etc.

67

6. Is there anything or anyone stopping you taking part in your local

community as much as you’d like to?

Prompt: this might be your health, money, or a person or organisation you

don’t like

7. How difficult do you find getting around so you can do the following, where

1 is ‘I have no problem doing this’ and 5 means ‘very difficult’?

Not

applicable 1 2 3 4 5

Your food shopping trip

Going to the doctors

Visiting the high street

Visiting relatives

Getting to the local hospital

Leaving the estate

READ: More questions about your area and the people in it

8. How often do you say hello to people in the estate or on Beaver’s Lane?

Where 1 is ‘never’ and 5 means ‘every day’?

Write in any comments here:

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None of the

time

Rarely Some of the

time

Often Every day

Don’t Know

READ: Please tell me how far the following statements apply to you on a

scale from 0 for not at all and 10 for totally.

9. This area is a place where local people look after each other.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

10. People who live in this area trust one another.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11. I would be happy asking certain local people to keep an eye on my house

and property.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

12. The people who live here can be relied upon to call police if someone is

acting suspiciously.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

13. Would you say it is an area in which people do things together and try to

help each other, or one in which people mostly go their own way?

Help each other Go own way Mixture

Don’t Know

READ: I’m now going to ask some questions about the people who are

important to you and who you see regularly: these could be friends, family,

neighbours, colleagues, whether in Hounslow, the UK or abroad.

69

PROCEED TO NETWORKS SHEET INSET3. READ: the following questions are

about how you’ve been feeling

14. Overall, how satisfied are you with your life now?

On a scale of 0-10 where 0 is extremely dissatisfied and 10 is extremely

satisfied.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

15. How would you rate your health generally? Where 0 is the worst possible

state and 10 is the best possible state.

16. To what extent would you agree with the following statement on a scale

of 1-5, where 1 means ‘never’ and 5 means ‘all of the time’?

‘I feel I belong to something I would call a community’

None of the

time

Rarely Some of the

time

Often All of the

time

Don’t Know

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

17. I am going to read out some statements that could apply to you.

For each one can you say which best describes your experience over the

past 2 weeks on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is ‘none of the time’ and 5 is ‘all of

the time’.

Statement None of

the time

Rarely Some of

the time

Often All of

the time

I’ve been feeling optimistic

about the future

I’ve been feeling useful

I’ve been feeling relaxed

70

I’ve been dealing with

problems very well

I’ve been thinking clearly

None of

the time

Rarely Some of

the time

Often All of

the time

I’ve been feeling close to

other people

I’ve been able to make up my

own mind about things

(INTERVIEWER NOTE – ‘good’ is on the left, ‘bad’ is on the right !)

None of

the time

Rarely Some of

the time

Often All of

the time

Things have been getting on

top of me

18. How stressful, if at all, are each of these aspects of your life at the moment?

Where 1 is ‘not at all stressful’ and 5 is ‘very stressful’.

Not

applicable 1 2 3 4 5

Your work life

Debt or financial problems

Your health

Your family life

Your marriage/relationship

with significant other

19. Which of these public services have you or your children used in the last six

months? Select all that apply.

Type No Yes, as a

one off

Yes, part of on-

going

treatment

Don’t

know

GP or nurse

Hospital

A&E/emergency services

Home care / Social care workers

Housing support worker

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Day centre

Child care

Mental health services

Family social services Police or probation officer

5. To finish up: some final questions about you

1. Age 18 -

24

25 -

34

35 -

44

45 -

54

55 -

64

65 -

74

75 -

84 85+

2. Gender (circle one): Male Female Other Rather not say

3. Where were you born?

Hounslow Somewhere else in the

UK

Outside the UK (please

state country)

4. What is your ethnic group? Please choose the description that best

describes you. (Tick all that apply)□

White: British □

Irish □

European □

Polish □

Lithuanian □

Romanian □

Eastern European □

Other □

Mixed: White and

Black/British □

White and

Asian/British □

Other □

Asian or Asian

British:

Asian British □

Indian □

Pakistani □

Afghan □

Bangladeshi □

Sri Lankan Tamil □

Burmese/Burman □ Nepalese/Gurkha □

Other □

Black or Black

British:

Black British □

African □

Caribbean □

Nigerian □

Somali □

Ghanaian □

Other □

Chinese or Chinese

British:

Chinese □

Chinese British □

Other □

Other ethnic group: Irish Traveller □

Roma/Gypsy

Traveller □

72

Other □

Please write in

5.a. What is your main/ what are your main language(s)?

□English

□Other (Write in, including British Sign

Language)_______________________________

5.b. If English is not your main language, how well can you speak, read and

write in English? (Please tick one) □Very well □ Well □ Not well

6. What is your highest level of qualification? □ Refused

GCSE or equivalent (e.g.

NVQ) A-level or equivalent

Undergraduate degree

or equivalent

Higher degree (Masters,

PhD) No qualifications

7. What is your working status at the moment? □ Refused

Full time (more than 16

hours a week)

Part time (less than 16

hours a week) Student

Retired Looking after home or

family

Unable to work:

sickness or disability

Unemployed Other (please write in)

8. If currently working, what is your occupation (write in):

□ Refused

__________________________________

9. What is the total income of your whole household before any tax or other

deductions? □ Refused

Less than £15 000 £15 000 - £25 000 £25 000 - £35 000

£35 000 - £45 000 More than £45 000 Not sure

10. What is your household status? □ Refused

Living alone Living with a partner, no

dependent children

Living with a partner

and children

73

Living with children but

not a partner

Living with extended

family

Living with people I am

not related to

Living with parents Other (please write in)

11. What is your housing status? □ Refused

Council/ Places for

People tenant Private renter

Other (please write in)

Owner-occupier No fixed address

Survey inset sheet: social networks questions

The tables ‘Step 1’ and ‘Step 4’, below, are taken from the social network inset sheet to the main survey.

STEP 1 NAME NAME NAME NAME

Who are the people you most enjoy

socialising and spending time with?

Who do you go to if you want to

discuss any problems and get advice?

Who gives you everyday practical help

when you need it such as putting up a

shelf, or picking up shopping/a

prescription?

If you lost your purse or wallet and

needed to borrow money from

someone, who could you ask?

Who are the people who always seem

to know someone useful locally, for

example if you wanted to organise or

change something?

STEP 4 CHART 1 2 3

Full name

Occupation:

How do you know them? Living in Meadows

(Beavers)? □ □ □

Living in Hounslow? □ □ □

The same ethnicity as you? □ □ □