Family, friends, volunteering. These are the three strands of the fabric that make up the support network on which people feel they can rely in times of difficulty, and to which they would turn for help. Public services provided by the local council and central government, together with fellow citizens, rank at the bottom of this virtual ranking of support networks. Thus, it is still these close-knit networks that provide support, whilst as we move further away from our immediate circle of acquaintances, this network appears to become much more tenuous.<\/p>\n
The hierarchy of solidarity is clearly defined, but it varies significantly from region to region. It is as though our country\u2019s social capital were characterised by marked inequality. Unsurprisingly, when seeking help, over four-fifths of people would turn to their family and kinship network (83.1%). However, whilst this tendency is shared uniformly across Central and Northern Italy, it decreases significantly in the South (77.6 per cent). In second place, people would turn to their circle of friends, particularly in the North-East (74.0%) and the North-West (62.0%). Conversely, it is once again the South that shows a significantly lower figure (44.4%). Volunteering lags further behind, though once again with regional variations. The North-East remains the area where such activities are most widespread and where people would turn to for help (44.3 per cent), followed by the North-West (38.9 per cent). Bringing up the rear is the South (19.4 per cent), where this support network does not yet appear to be very well developed. Following these main pillars are two other key sources of support: the parish (17.3 per cent) and neighbours (15.4 per cent).<\/p>\n
As can be seen, as we move away from the primary spheres, networks become less of a point of reference. In this case, however, whilst the parish acts as an anchor particularly in the North-East (21.5 per cent), where the Church has traditionally represented a substantial part of the local welfare system, in the South it is neighbours who predominate (20.7 per cent). The role of the community of friends in these areas constitutes a form of solidarity that complements that of the family, more so than elsewhere. At the bottom of the ranking we find public services (local council: 11.6 per cent; central government: 8.4 per cent) and fellow citizens (10.1 per cent). Therefore, whilst the perception among respondents that the local community is distant may be understandable \u2013 particularly for those living in cities \u2013 the role assigned to public services, which are perceived as distant and unreliable, is more problematic. Furthermore, it should be emphasised that in the South, the proportion of people who would rely on public services is almost a third lower (around 5 per cent) than that of citizens in the North (around 13 per cent).<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Famiglia, amici, volontariato. Questi sono i tre fili dell\u2019ordito che costituisce quella rete cui la popolazione ritiene di contare in caso di difficolt\u00e0, a cui si rivolgerebbe per chiedere un…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[35,9,50,57,54],"class_list":["post-5762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-sondaggi","tag-famiglie","tag-futuro","tag-societa-2","tag-solidarieta","tag-volontariato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.community.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.community.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.community.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.community.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.community.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5762"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.community.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13089,"href":"https:\/\/www.community.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5762\/revisions\/13089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.community.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.community.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.community.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}