Social isolation

The term social isolation describing in social work, the living conditions of people who have little social contact with other people. Depending on how far the average level of contacts is not reached, which is considered within the demographic group with respect to a person than usual, social isolation can have a significant mental illness value. However, such a disease attribution is not mandatory: As a sociological category, in a specific case, social isolation quite exist objectively, without the person subjectively perceives this as a defect. In order to make this distinction between the objective facts of social isolation and the subjective assessment by the person concerned also significantly in conceptual terms, social isolation is often compared to the feeling of loneliness: As a lonely here a person who feels the number and intensity of their social contacts as inadequate and suffers from this deficiency. It is easily possible that a person subjectively suffers from loneliness, although she has by objective standards, a sufficient number of social contacts.

On the origin of social isolation numerous factors can contribute, which are partly among themselves interrelated and can be mutually reinforcing. Almost all of these factors revolve around the question of what impact they have on the ability of a person to participate in social life. The reason for this approach is that such participation is an essential prerequisite for being able to establish social contacts. To distinguish between exogenous factors (in the sense of belonging to a social risk group) and endogenous factors that are attributable to the personality structure of the individual.

• 2.1 Negative self image
• 2.2 Inappropriate generalization of specific social experiences
• 2.3 Selective negative perception
• 2.4 Specific Attributierungsmuster

• 4.1 General issues
• 4.2 UCLA Loneliness Scale

Exogenous factors (social risk groups)

Loneliness is socially caused ( with ), is so far a field of work sociology. As a social ( rather than psychological ) consequence of isolation especially the anomie is described. For almost all of the groups listed here that too constative in relation to society as a whole insulation can be subjectively reduced if the specified group is numerically so strong that it can even act as part of society. Within such a part of society can then even a particularly intense social exchange rule, which is quite satisfactory for the members of the group. This of course does not change the continuing isolation from society as a whole. ( See also parallel society. )

As individual social categories of the isolated may be mentioned:

Seniors

Older people run the risk of age-related breakdown of social conditions under which they have lived for decades to lose touch with their social environment. These processes include the resolution retirement from professional life, the loss of a partner in the declining physical performance and the associated limitations of active participation in society, and not least the experience of the gradual thinning of the own generation.

Student

Many students are primarily located at the beginning of their studies in an isolated situation. The admission to the course is often associated with the change of place of residence, so that the connections to the existing friends and acquaintances are difficult or completely cancel. Likewise ends with the extract from the parental home feel at any time to start a safe haven in which one learns protection and attention. Finally, the new role as a student high demands on individuals to organize their own lives and to assert themselves in the network initially unknown institutions.

Single Parents

Lone parents in employment are often claimed by the double burden of work and education performance to such a high degree that there is sufficient participation in social life time and personal energy is not sufficient. The conditions associated with the educational task requirements often lead to only a part-time job can be completed. This in turn has the consequence that the household income may be too low to be able to participate in social life.

Criminal persecution

Criminal persecution subject depending on the calculation methods of the risk of being socially isolated. During the investigation, there may be a loss for the persecuted of the social environment, which arises from the suspicion of a crime. Also, the criminal persecution itself can be isolated socially, especially when he is persecuted innocent and the presumption of innocence reversed into its opposite. If the proportionality principle is not respected in law enforcement, this may mean for the persecuted enormous psychosocial and social damage.

Prisoner

Prisoners are rigorously excluded from the participation in social life. However, the extreme situation of enforced with state violence, inclusion can lead to the development of a microcosm within the detention center in which form their own rules. Social isolation is under these conditions, on the one hand envisaged as the inability ( or lack of will) of individuals to fit this microcosm in the applicable standards, on the other hand but also as a problem in their reintegration into society after serving the sentence. ( See also the "total institution," solitary confinement. )

Foreigners or migrants

People from foreign countries are often grown under conditions radically different from those that apply in the receiving society as normal. Religious characteristics, social roles ( for example, between men and women, old and young, etc.), the importance of social relationships or family can vary greatly so that integration of immigrants into the host society fails. In addition, migrants often have to contend with often considerable resentment of the population, so that the participation in social life must be fought to rule, if they succeed at all. Another problem is a lack of linguistic understanding, which makes integration possible.

Chronically Sick and Disabled

Sick and disabled people are often seen by their surroundings as limited in their performance and meet the expectations not be a performance-oriented Western-style society. In addition, disease and disability may have limitations in mobility and sensory perception cause, making it difficult to participate in social life. Examples: skin diseases can cause one is shunned by other people; because of a hearing disability can not participate in discussions you; Autism suppressed the desire or the ability to interact with other people in contact or self maintain with the help of other contacts made, in people with schizophrenia or the so-called schizophrenic attributable disease may be the way to social contacts and their maintenance also be hard to walk.

In very elderly people

The level of support from other people for the primary caregiver of an old person is dependent on the social network in which they both live. Litwin and Landau differ among the over -75s, four types of social networks:

• Network with diffuse bonds ( about 42 percent), similar in the family network (see below ), consisting of approximately eleven individuals with predominantly loose relationships
• On friends centered network (approximately 28 percent) with about nine people ( almost half of Friends) and rather loose relationship
• Network members (about 22 percent ), consisting of an average of up to ten people, mostly relatives and children, characterized by a very close relationship
• Family intensive network (about 8 percent) with an average of four people (almost exclusively children ) characterized by less close relationships

Unemployed person

Unemployed for a long time put in Western industrial societies, although no longer a fringe group dar. However, due to the prevailing value system, they are still seen as people who are temporarily not conform to the societal expectation of an aligned on the working life at least, and are therefore perceived as outsiders. Very often the victims themselves have internalized this value system so that they see themselves as failures and stay away from public life in shame. This tendency is reinforced by the associated with unemployment worsening of the material situation. The role of attribution as outsider is objectively justified insofar otherwise than with the loss of a job and the sudden loss of often intense social contacts with colleagues is also connected at work.

Gifted

Gifted people (especially students) learn that their abilities, although neutral favorable rating, are perceived or evaluated by the ( formal and friendly ) environment as negative. This can lead to a refusal of the person with a correspondingly strong isolation within the social environment ( see also nerd ). In addition, feel gifted contact with people who do not act on appropriately high level ( think, communicate, act ), often referred to as tiring or unsatisfactory and partially voluntarily choose a more or less isolated.

Refugees, illegal immigrants

Refugees who do not speak the language of the country, draw due to the existing language barrier into solitude. Although she would have liked to socialize, they can not build because no communication is possible. This type of insulation can lead to crime and mental illnesses such as neuroses and psychoses.

Endogenous factors

Common feature of the above endogenous factors is the fact that they are increasingly solidify with continued isolation, since the ability to relativize and the adequate assessment of their own experiences and the external events just missing due to lack of social experience. This creates the risk that the isolated person maneuvered through their distorted perception in a situation in which the breaking out of isolation on its own is virtually impossible. The Insulated developed a self-contained, hermetic self-image that is disconnected from social reality and can lead to actions and behaviors that become independent from social feedback, so to speak: the normal social control loop, in which one's own actions in the reactions of the environment is measured and, if necessary, corrected or adjusted, is pierced in severe cases of social isolation.

Negative self image

Lack of self -esteem lets people doubt that others might perceive it positively as valuable, pleasant or otherwise. Under mental anticipation of imminent rejections such persons therefore do not even attempt to check their negative assessments by practical experience (self -fulfilling prophecy ).

Inappropriate generalization of specific social experiences

The lack of social experience leads to isolated people living on the evaluation of individual, randomly occurring negative events in their generality. In addition, there is a tendency to hide the particular circumstances of an actually existing situation insulation and replace it with the view to fit generally not into social contexts.

Selective negative perception

Isolated living people develop patterns of perception, in which negative experiences are processed, increasingly, while positive events are systematically hidden. The subjective experience of one's own role in the social environment is therefore a string of failures and rejections. Fear of failure and the general expectation of evil lead to increased withdrawal from the social space.

Specific Attributierungsmuster

Isolated living people tend to ( pseudo-) to develop explanations for their isolation, the common pattern is that the unsatisfactory and perceived as painful social experiences are attributed always negative characteristics of one's personality ( internal attribution ) - for example, lack of attractiveness or kindness. The back pushed and rejected by society sentient person thus provides precisely this society almost the arguments for why it's "right" to signal repulsion and rejection. The idea that the reasons for the failure of social interaction could also be in the opposite situation, or in the circumstances ( external attribution ), a chronic isolated person is often no longer communicable.

Lack of social skills

The listed factors describe a personality structure that appears as a contrast to what is commonly referred to as " social skills " or " self-confidence ": Self-confident people are characterized in that they develop a particular claim in relation to their social needs that they able are these claims to formulate open, and have the ability to use suitable means to enforce their claims. Each of these aspects is weak or no training in socially isolated individuals.

Wichard pulse develops in his paper ( see References ) a complex model of influencing factors and their mutual relations that work towards the development of social isolation and is the central component of the lack of social competence. This lack is sponsored by

• Personality traits ( tendency to neurotic and psychotic behavior, introversion )
• Disorders in the child's development process (see Attachment Theory )
• Demographic factors ( low income, poor education)
• Opposing behavior of the interaction partners in pairs and small groups
• Social competitiveness
• Unemployment

The lack of social skills is itself the cause of negative social experiences:

• Opposing behavior of the interaction partners in twos and small groups ( amplifying feedback on one of the causes of lack of social skills! )
• Failure in one relationships
• Low status within small groups

Along with some other factors, the facts of social isolation is hereby already been fulfilled. If this state of affairs also subjectively experienced as loneliness, then the feelings of loneliness affect as an additional aggravating factor to the negative behavior of the interaction partner. In severe cases, feelings of loneliness triggers for further complications such as the development of depression or an addiction (especially alcoholism), which in turn again back negative effect on the central factor of lack of social skills. Through these multiple feedbacks in the process causing social isolation, a kind of isolation spiral from which the concerned person can not escape on their own developed.

Methodological approaches

General issues

While the cited exogenous factors can be determined by simple fact finding with respect to the external life situation usually, the review of the endogenous factors significantly more difficult: First, it is obvious that mental constructs such as the self-image that a man constructed by themselves, difficult to ask are as overt lying facts. On the other hand touch on issues that are aimed at isolation and loneliness, the highly sensitive area of human appreciation, so that both must be generally expected low responsiveness as well with a difficult to interpret mix of beautifully colored responses in terms of social desirability on the one hand and at the same time unrealistic negative expectations on the other. In addition, the above observations show that the self-assessment in relation to social isolation can completely detach from the externally observable, objectively verifiable factors. For this reason, for example, offers the attempt to determine the degree of isolation of a person through additional questioning by a third party, usually only limited possibilities of knowledge.

UCLA Loneliness Scale

The most common empirical tool to identify the perceived social isolation is known under the name " UCLA Loneliness Scale" questionnaire by Russell, Peplau and Cutrona. It contains 20 statements to which the subject in each case by selecting an answer on a four-point scale ( never, rarely, sometimes, often ) takes place. Examples of such statements as " I feel ignored ", " No one knows me really well," or "There are people to whom I can turn at any time ."