Stepping Stones: Using Letter Writing to Support Human Connections

Overview: Social isolation and loneliness undermine our human rights, limiting our potential in both individual and community contexts. This presentation will discuss a university-community collaborative research project that examined the development of relationships over a year-long letter writing exchange between MSW students and participants of local agencies that attend to poverty.Proposal text: Social isolation and loneliness undermine our human rights, limiting our potential in both individual and community contexts. The NASW Code of Ethics (2021) notes the “importance of human relationships” as an essential core professional value, reinforcing our professional responsibility to foster life-giving connections. Intimate social relationships foster physical health and emotional well-being, but community changes over the past forty years have often failed to foster necessary connectedness (Putnam, 2000).

Social isolation can be described as the lack of social connections, family, or community (Fakoya et al., 2020; Fakoya et al., 2021). Social isolation is linked with poor health habits (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015) and catastrophic health outcomes (Bu, Philip, & Fancourt, 2020; Bu, Steptoe, & Fancourt, 2020; Kaye & Singer, 2019), many of which have been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic (Holden, 2020; Wu, 2020). While technology may help address some resultant community gaps, rural communities and areas marked by poverty may lack the necessary resources to substitute technology for face-to-face engagement. Loneliness is a more subjective measure of how someone feels or perceives their isolation (De Jong Giervel & Van Tilburg, 2006; Smith et al., 2020). Recent studies indicate that people are increasingly lonely (Brooks, 2018; Cigna, 2019; Reiner, 2019). Taken together, loneliness and social isolation offer dangerous outcomes for already marginalized communities.

Our study used a mixed methods research design to examine the development of relationships over a year-long letter writing exchange between MSW students and participants of local agencies that attend to poverty. Quantitative data were collected through a pretest posttest survey utilizing the UCLA Loneliness and the Loyola Generativity scales. Qualitative data were drawn from the letters themselves. A narrative inquiry approach was used to first categorize and then analyze the letter content (with the unit of analysis being the letter writing pair), to examine the ways in which the pair connected over time. Additional qualitative data were collected through a focus group dinner at the close of the project.

Through the research, we were able to better understand the complexities of poverty and social isolation as they affect communities that share some experiences (e.g., barriers to resources) but differ in other significant ways (e.g. age, life experience, community context or demography). The project began to assess the value of letter writing as a means of reducing social isolation and loneliness and increasing a sense of generativity.

This project directly fostered new and deeper university and community partnerships. Agency relationships were established and flourished over the course of the project leading to new ways to implement community connection through research that had the potential to offer direct benefits to agency participants. MSW students were engaged as research participants as well as research assistants and given the opportunity to learn new research skills, and in the case of letter writers, hone critical engagement skills.

This presentation will disseminate research findings, make direct connections with human rights, share strategies for enhancing university-community partnerships in real time, and provide lessons for incorporating MSW students into the research process.