Some reasons social relationships might be wrongly neglected:
Quality of Life measures and QALYs probably underestimate the effect of social relationships on quality of life and well-being
It seems difficult to measure cost effectiveness of interventions here
The idea of government policy very explicitly and openly trying to affect people’s social lives would feel like an overreach of power to some people (but interventions via NGOs probably isn’t a problem to most people)
Yeah, I didn’t want to speculate on why social relationships are underrated at first. That’s worthy of a multidisciplinary PhD thesis on its own, and I was stretching my arguments a bit as is.
Quality of Life measures and QALYs probably underestimate the effect of social relationships on quality of life
Yeah, that was a weird hole I found when examining the scientific and policy literature. There’s no explicit objection to it, it just never showed up to begin with. What’s interesting is that I dug through Vietnamese and Chinese sources, which did make reference to family and community bonds in planning! This makes me wonder if social relationships were more regarded in East Asian societies, and faded out of public discourse as people looked up to more Western empirical/academic approaches. Not to romanticise, of course. There’s a reason I left.
It seems difficult to measure cost effectiveness of interventions here
Agreed, haha. This post was less meant to say “here’s a really good intervention, and I can prove why you should fund it right now” and more “looking more closely at this metric could greatly improve impact assessments on a huge range of existing causes”. I also suggested taking causes already considered Most Effective or Nearly Most Effective and reassessing what happens when you apply a relationship-centric iteration of the approach. So for example, did anti-malaria interventions increase even more in cost-effectiveness when critical patients received frequent social support from their family? Or could bottlenecks in efficacy during interventions or fundraising be bypassed with a bit of peer pressure?
Anecdotally, if you’ve ever had a chronic condition, you might recognise how a supportive community makes a huge difference. I have late-diagnosed ADHD in a country with low mental healthcare coverage and awareness. >90% of the quality of life improvements from professional treatments would not have happened without peer advice and support, mostly online. I’ve helped others seek treatment, and all of them said that me just mentioning ADHD improved their decades of their quality of life (ADHD also has a quantifiable disease burden). So to me, there seems to be an untapped reservoir of very effective interventions resulting from social support, that are hard to pin an exact number on, but worth attempting to value because they’re just that valuable.
The idea of government policy very explicitly and openly trying to affect people’s social lives would feel like an overreach of power to some people (but interventions via NGOs probably isn’t a problem to most people)
Well, if you frame it like that, I’m compelled to agree. In practice though, there’s plenty of interventions with existing social dimensions. Pretty much anything involving minors relies on peer or parental pressure. Heck, the WHOQOL survey I used has been implemented for over a decade with no issues to speak of.
Again, I think this reflects a cognitive dichotomy between family/friends and policy, and people find it weird for the two to intersect even though those concepts blend together all the time without us noticing. Family and friends’ financial outcomes has a huge impact on individual outcomes, yet I hardly see it mentioned in tax reform debates.
Great post, thanks for writing it!
Some reasons social relationships might be wrongly neglected:
Quality of Life measures and QALYs probably underestimate the effect of social relationships on quality of life and well-being
It seems difficult to measure cost effectiveness of interventions here
The idea of government policy very explicitly and openly trying to affect people’s social lives would feel like an overreach of power to some people (but interventions via NGOs probably isn’t a problem to most people)
Yeah, I didn’t want to speculate on why social relationships are underrated at first. That’s worthy of a multidisciplinary PhD thesis on its own, and I was stretching my arguments a bit as is.
Yeah, that was a weird hole I found when examining the scientific and policy literature. There’s no explicit objection to it, it just never showed up to begin with. What’s interesting is that I dug through Vietnamese and Chinese sources, which did make reference to family and community bonds in planning! This makes me wonder if social relationships were more regarded in East Asian societies, and faded out of public discourse as people looked up to more Western empirical/academic approaches. Not to romanticise, of course. There’s a reason I left.
Agreed, haha. This post was less meant to say “here’s a really good intervention, and I can prove why you should fund it right now” and more “looking more closely at this metric could greatly improve impact assessments on a huge range of existing causes”. I also suggested taking causes already considered Most Effective or Nearly Most Effective and reassessing what happens when you apply a relationship-centric iteration of the approach. So for example, did anti-malaria interventions increase even more in cost-effectiveness when critical patients received frequent social support from their family? Or could bottlenecks in efficacy during interventions or fundraising be bypassed with a bit of peer pressure?
Anecdotally, if you’ve ever had a chronic condition, you might recognise how a supportive community makes a huge difference. I have late-diagnosed ADHD in a country with low mental healthcare coverage and awareness. >90% of the quality of life improvements from professional treatments would not have happened without peer advice and support, mostly online. I’ve helped others seek treatment, and all of them said that me just mentioning ADHD improved their decades of their quality of life (ADHD also has a quantifiable disease burden). So to me, there seems to be an untapped reservoir of very effective interventions resulting from social support, that are hard to pin an exact number on, but worth attempting to value because they’re just that valuable.
Well, if you frame it like that, I’m compelled to agree. In practice though, there’s plenty of interventions with existing social dimensions. Pretty much anything involving minors relies on peer or parental pressure. Heck, the WHOQOL survey I used has been implemented for over a decade with no issues to speak of.
Again, I think this reflects a cognitive dichotomy between family/friends and policy, and people find it weird for the two to intersect even though those concepts blend together all the time without us noticing. Family and friends’ financial outcomes has a huge impact on individual outcomes, yet I hardly see it mentioned in tax reform debates.