CHAPTER 7
BUILDING SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS:
INTIMACY AND FAMILIES

Sociologists at Work

Robert Wuthnow
The Quest for Community

How do people establish connections to one another in today's mobile, fragmented social world? In the early 1990s, sociologist Robert Wuthnow conducted a national survey and face-to-face interviews to find out.

Wuthnow's subjects were people deeply involved in small voluntary groups, such as special interest clubs, community associations, weight-control groups, Bible study groups, and book discussion groups. He also studied a comparable sample of people who were not members of such groups.

Wuthnow discovered that the depiction of Americans as "a society of lonely, self-interested individualists suffering from isolation, disrupted families, a lack of friends, difficulty in establishing intimate relationships, and the demeaning anonymity of large-scale institutions" does not provide a complete picture of contemporary social life.1

Our family ties may indeed have become looser than in previous eras, and we are, perhaps, more inclined to fear our neighbors today than to feel a common bond with them. Nevertheless, we have been able to find meaningful relationships and a sense of community elsewhere.

Wuthnow found that 40% of adults 18 and older living in the continental United States (roughly 75 million individuals) claim to be involved in "a small group that meets regularly and provides caring and support for those who participate in it."2 Thirty-eight percent of them are involved in at least two or three groups, and half have been involved for five years or more.

Small voluntary groups have also become a mainstay of established social institutions. Religious organizations, for example, alarmed by shrinking memberships, have made small groupsóBible study groups, support groups, youth ministries, retreat centersóa vital part of their programs.

Many Jewish communities are experimenting with havurot, small informal gatherings in private homes.

Intimate gatherings like these meet a variety of needs:

[They] draw individuals out of themselves, pull them out of their isolated personal lives, and put them in the presence of others where they can share their needs and concerns, make friends, and become linked to wider social networks. Small groups provide a way of transcending our most self-centered interests; they temper our individualism and our culturally induced desire to be totally independent of one another. . . . Even amidst the dislocating tendencies of our society, [we] are capable of banding together in bonds of mutual support.3

Wuthnow points out that small voluntary groups function very much like families. Both involve relatively few people who interact intimately, both can involve strong emotional bonds, and both help to shape people's identities.

But small groups and families are also different. Small group members typically don't share the heritage, physical traits, or personality characteristics that connect people in families. In addition, members of small groups don't bear legal responsibility for feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating, and providing medical support for others.

Small voluntary groups are also different from other social connections that have traditionally given people a sense of belonging, such as neighborhoods, ethnic groups, tribes, and so forth.

With these other forms of community, people generally live in the same area, see each other a lot in the course of their everyday lives, and identify themselves with various aspects of material culture, such as buildings, streets, parks, food customs, and distinctive clothing.

In contrast, in the small groups Wuthnow studied, people from various locations and perhaps different subcultures come together regularly (on average, once a week) for group meetings.

So the sense of community we derive from small groups, unlike families and neighborhoods, is something over which we have a great deal of control. We choose which groups we want to join, and we choose whether or not to attend a meeting. We may feel an obligation to provide emotional support and may even donate a lot of money and time to the group, but we have no serious, formal, legal responsibilities to do so.

Yet these intimate settings are effective ways of encouraging both spiritual renewal and a sense of belonging.

1 Wuthnow, R. 1994. Sharing the journey. New York: Free Press. p. 12.
2 Wuthnow, R. 1994. Sharing the journey. New York: Free Press. p. 45.
3 Wuthnow, R. 1994. Sharing the journey. New York: Free Press. p. 12.