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In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the threats to health posed by loneliness. One of the main strategies that has been recommended to address this is social prescribing (SP). This typically involves general practitioners (GPs) and other health practitioners directing clients who are experiencing loneliness and related conditions to take part in social activities—typically in recreational and community contexts. However, evidence for the effectiveness of SP is mixed—leading some to suggest that enthusiasm for it might be misplaced. In this review, we argue that a core problem with most existing approaches to SP is that they lack a strong theoretical base. This has been a barrier to (a) understanding when SP will work and why, (b) designing optimally effective SP programmes, and (c) developing practitioner skills and appropriate infrastructure to support them. As a corrective to this state of affairs, this review outlines a three-tier social identity framework for SP and five associated hypotheses. These hypotheses predict that SP will be more effective when (a) clients join groups and (b) these groups are ones with which they identify, and when SP is supported by (c) social-identity-enhancing social infrastructure, (d) a social-identity-based therapeutic alliance, and (e) identity leadership that builds and shapes this alliance as well as clients' identification with prescribed groups. This framework is supported by a range of evidence and provides an agenda for much-needed future research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 5th International Conference on Social Identity and Health (ICSIH 5) and its research on the Social Identity Approach to Health (SIAH). It highlights the theoretical foundations of SIAH, its benefits, and the role of multiple group memberships in enhancing resilience. It emphasizes the application of Social Cure insights in clinical, health, sport, and organizational settings.

We suggest a new democratic decision-making (or recommendation-making) device for divided societies that may be added to the democratic toolkit. Imaginative Policy Surveys in divided societies seek to combine the advantages of conventional attitude surveys (ability to generalise to the wider population) with some of the advantages of deliberative mini-publics (citizens learn about policy options and consider the perspective of members of the ethno-national out-group). Imaginative Policy Surveys consist of a conventional survey design with two added features: videos providing information and arguments and an imagined policy dialogue with an out-group member. We test the feasibility, effect and perceived legitimacy of Imaginative Policy Surveys in the deeply divided context of Northern Ireland, drawing on evidence from two experiments. We conclude that Imaginative Policy Surveys in divided societies are feasible, have a slight positive pro-compromise effect, and are perceived to be a legitimate decision-making mechanism to an equal extent by rival ethno-national groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it has been shown that identification with a neighbourhood community can support intergroup relations within the community by providing resources to cope with intergroup contact, previous research has not investigated how the perceived diversity of the neighbourhood identity influences this process. This study extends research on neighbourhood identification by focusing on a specific group (mothers of small children), examining how and when identification with other mothers living in the same neighbourhood is related to intergroup contact with local outgroup mothers. We examined this in a survey study, for which we collected data from both Finnish majority and immigrant mothers at public maternal and child healthcare centres (N = 733). Our study showed that identification with the neighbourhood mother community was positively associated with intergroup contact, partly via perceived social support from other neighbourhood mothers for both Finnish majority and immigrant mothers. Our study additionally revealed that the perceived proportion of outgroup mothers in the local mother community moderated the relationship between identification and intergroup contact for both groups. Our findings highlight the significance of considering perceived diversity for determining when identification will support intergroup contact. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eating disorder recovery is an identity transition characterised by ambivalence, in which group memberships play an important part. However, our understanding of how memberships of groups with different recovery norms (i.e., supportive vs. unsupportive of recovery) can facilitate or inhibit recovery is limited. To address this gap, this study adopted the Social Identity Model of Recovery to examine how recovery is manifest through the changing composition of an individual's group memberships. We employed a convergent mixed methods design to quantitatively determine whether specific groups (i.e., family, friends, and online groups) are more helpful to eating disorder recovery than others, and to qualitatively explore how group (in)compatibility shapes recovery efforts. There was a high level of convergence across survey (N = 112) and interview (N = 12) data: groups could have a positive or negative impact according to their recovery norms; different groups provided different forms of support and identity‐expression; incompatibility was not always experienced as a problem and could afford strategic benefits. Our findings are amongst the first to attest to the importance of considering identity networks (and their normative content) during eating disorder recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Loneliness is a pernicious problem in older adulthood, associated with physical decline and isolation from valued social groups. However, the long‐term evolving experiences of ageing, identity and loneliness have yet to be elucidated. We use a Qualitative Longitudinal Research interview approach with nine vulnerable older adults (Agemean = 79.4 years), in which five participants were interviewed twice between 2019 and 2020, and four participants were interviewed at three‐time points from 2019 to 2021. This study aims to understand the unfolding experiences of ageing, social identity and loneliness during a prolonged period of social isolation during the Coronavirus pandemic. A theoretically guided thematic analysis highlights that participants initially experience 'Categorisation as Vulnerable and Loss of Agency' and 'Shrinking Social Worlds', leading to 'Undermining of Reciprocal Support' and 'Fears of Persistent Loneliness'. Findings suggest that interventions to ameliorate loneliness among older adults would benefit from addressing age‐based stereotypes and emphasising the value of reciprocal contributions that older adults can make to their networks, as well as scaffolding and enhancing social identification with new groups. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that mobility weakens collective norms and increases tolerance has a long pedigree in sociology. In this article, we examine the association of migration with partisan identification as British Unionists or Irish Nationalists in Northern Ireland, a region where the overlap of opposing religious and national identities is reflected in the residential segregation of its population. In representative samples of the population, we find that Irish Nationalist identification among Catholics and British Unionist identification among Protestants was lower among people not born in Northern Ireland and return migrants from beyond the British Isles. Having lived in the Republic was associated with more Nationalist identification among Catholics but less Unionist identification among Protestants and others. Moreover, having lapsed from the family religion is associated with decreased partisan identification. While international migration has in many countries led to increased tensions, conflict and the ascendance of exclusionary national populist movements, our results thus suggest that mobility beyond the British Isles has contributed to less nation–state conflict in Northern Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an abundance of available literature on ethnic prejudice among children that spans almost a century. While there have been a number of attempts to review and synthesise this literature, each has been restricted in one or more respects. Firstly, existing studies tend not to be systematic in their approach to identifying the relevant literature. Secondly, some reviews do not use meta-analytic techniques. Thirdly there are reviews that are not always specific to education. Fourthly, there are reviews that tend to be focused on one particular intervention technique. Fifthly and finally, there are reviews that focus on more general outcomes such as social exclusion across many forms of prejudice and so fail to provide a direct understanding of ethnic prejudice specifically. In contrast, this proposed review will be thorough and systematic in its approach to identifying eligible studies and also wide-ranging and inclusive in seeking to compare the effectiveness of all school-based approaches to reducing ethnic prejudice and promoting respect for diversity among children aged 3-11.

Contemporary Western society has encouraged an obesogenic culture of eating amongst youth. Multiple factors may influence an adolescent's susceptibility to this eating culture, and thus act as a barrier to healthy eating. Given the increasing prevalence of obesity amongst adolescents, the need to reduce these barriers has become a necessity. Twelve focus group discussions of single-sex groups of boys or girls ranging from early to-mid adolescence (N=73) were employed to identify key perceptions of, and influences upon, healthy eating behaviour. Thematic analysis identified four key factors as barriers to healthy eating. These factors were: physical and psychological reinforcement of eating behaviour; perceptions of food and eating behaviour; perceptions of contradictory food-related social pressures; and perceptions of the concept of healthy eating itself. Overall, healthy eating as a goal in its own right is notably absent from the data and would appear to be elided by competing pressures to eat unhealthily and to lose weight. This insight should inform the development of future food-related communications to adolescents.

Becoming a mother is often accompanied by a loss of social connections, which can reduce the availability of social support. This can increase maternal stress with negative health outcomes. Therefore, we examined how mothers' social contact with other mothers living in the same neighborhood can form a compensative source of social support and wellbeing. Data was collected from mothers (N = 443) of a child under school age while visiting the public maternity and child health clinics located in two neighborhoods in Helsinki, Finland. We found that mothers' frequent and positive contact with other local mothers was positively related with their life satisfaction through identification‐based social support. Contact also had a specific indirect effect on life satisfaction through social support. Frequent positive contact with other local mothers can serve to scaffold the emergence of social identification, which in turn unlocks further social support with positive health effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal segregation has been widely studied in various public settings but not on public playgrounds. Drawing on an 11-month ethnography among mothers of young children, we examine how informal segregation is (re)produced on public playgrounds in two ethnically diverse neighborhoods in Finland. Our findings reveal different normative practices. First, normative rhythms and parenting practices structure playground activities by limiting opportunities for contact between ethnic minority and majority groups and producing exclusive spaces. Second, group norms and the seeking of ethnic/racial ingroup members together regulate mothers' interaction with outgroup mothers on playgrounds; mothers are inclined toward their ingroup while outgroup mothers are often ignored, resulting in only illusory contact. Based on our analysis, we argue that by better understanding the normative roots of segregation, more comprehensive and effective interventions can be designed to facilitate positive contact in this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]