Social Communication Of Middle - Aged And Old People In Weak Relationship Network

The majority of the domestic empirical researches which refer to the topic of social interaction of the middle-aged and the aged people usually take into account this topic as one part of social participation. Consequently, there is a huge lack of articles which only focuses on the topic of social interaction of them. Besides, even this kind of researches about social participation mostly adopt the quantitative method. Equally, there is a lack of qualitative articles.This research focuses on social interaction of the middle-aged and the aged people who take part in the spontaneous group activities. Through the observation about the process of social interaction from the different types of the middle-aged and the aged groups under the scenes of the square-dancing and the Ikea-gathering, I discovered that:(1)Inside some social interaction groups, lots of the middle-aged and the aged people seldom engage in communications with others emotionally.And this empirical observation partly doubt the hypothesis of Carstensen’s socio-emotional selectivity theory.(2)Through these kinds of social interaction activities,most of them set up a weak-ties network,which probably provide an another type of informal support,named’being in group’ support by myself.Nevertheless,this type of support although can be regarded as informal support,it does not perform the same functions which the general informal support can often do. And this tentative opinion perhaps can provide a new outlet for the after researches on informal support of the aged people.At last, this article provides the social-science researchers and the social workers some enlightening and practical suggestions in the following aspects:the environment of social interaction,the group work of the middle-aged and aged people, the community work in city and the promotion of reemployment of the middle-aged and aged people.