Social Support Networks of Italian Couples

During the last decades, researchers have shown great interest in the topic of social support and international literature has illustrated the importance of the network of relationships that bind an individual to the people who are close to him in his everyday life. This set of people represents the “social space” surrounding individuals (Pattison et al., 2004). The social space can take shape in the (immediate or extended) family and the circles of friends, workmates, or neighbors; it can generate strong or weak ties that interact with individual choices, and it can take the form of emotional support, instrumental support, or social companionship. According to this line of research, we intend: i) to analyze the Potential Support Ego (PSE)-centered networks of Italian couples along the different phases of family formation; ii) to extract structurally similar groups (PSE-network typologies) from partners’ ego-networks by means of multivariate techniques for categorical data. More specifically, our research questions concern: the characteristics of partners’ ego-social support networks; the types of help couples receive from people outside the immediate family; the effect of network typologies on the probability of receiving help in the household life course.