A Research On The Construction Of The Elderly’s Neighborhood Social Support Network In New Community

Social support network plays a very important role in people’s daily life. For theelderly, social support networks is significantly more important. Some studies haveshown that social support is an important factor in affecting the elderly subjectivewell-being, life satisfaction and mental health. If the elderly have more social support,they will have more happiness and higher life satisfaction.Taoyuan is a newly built community where the author has joined the project named“Plan of Three Areas”. Through the survey, we have found that the aged people inthecommunity have moved to this new community only in a few months. Thus, theiroriginal social support network has been broken and they are in a lack of effective socialsupport. Meantime, the existing social support network is weak and single. In theTaoyuan community we use the social support network theory as the guiding theory，usegroup work as interventional method and use neighborhood relations as thebreakthrough point in building the social support network. After recruiting the elderly,we have carried out four group activities to help them to rebuild social support network,and explore an effective mode to help the elderly rebuild the social support networks innew community The final evaluation of the results showed that, on the one hand, theintervention has achieved some success: the elderly have built a relatively closerelationship with each other, social support condition of elderly people has beenimproved, and the elderly people’s initiative to build social support networks has alsobeen enhanced; on the other hand, making the neighborhood relation as a breakthroughpoint to intervene the reconstruction of the elderly people’s social support network in anew community is an effective way.