Clifford Stevenson

Nottingham Trent University | NTU · Division of Psychology

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...

Rape is widely used as a weapon of war. Despite its prevalence and impact, war rape is rarely reported, partly because it is perceived as norm violating in the patriarchal societies within which it often purposely occurs (e.g., by violating the norm that women should remain chaste), leading to survivors being excluded from their families and commun...

This research explored how to take a successful and established approach for creating place-based opportunities for Social Prescribing (referred to as the “Inspiring A” model) from one district in Nottinghamshire and recreate the same approach in two different districts. The Inspiring A model set up by a Community Voluntary Action group successfull...

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 neighbour...

Groups have their health and well-being impacted by satisfying their members’ needs and providing resources to help cope with threats. Multiple group memberships serve to accumulate these benefits and also provide resilience to the effects of group loss. However, the additional well-being benefits of belonging to multiple different types of group r...

Although informal segregation often persists in multiethnic neighbourhoods, local institutions offering public services may act as an important setting for intergroup contact. Therefore, we studied how immigrant mothers of young children discursively construct institutional intergroup contact with workers of public playgrounds and kindergartens. We...

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 yea...

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 adopt...

Background Loneliness is a significant well-being issue that affects older adults. Existing, commonly used social connection platforms do not contain facilities to break the cognitive cycle of loneliness, and loneliness interventions implemented without due processes could have detrimental effects on well-being. There is also a lack of digital tech...

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...

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 m...

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 wellb...

Although the benefits of contact for positive intergroup relations are widely acknowledged, less is known about how group members construct the agency and responsibility of contact participants in intergroup encounters. Using critical discursive psychology, we analysed the interpretative repertoires that Finnish majority mothers (N = 13) and mother...

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. Fi...

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic impacted older adults' social connections and increased loneliness, but also led to increased technology adoption, providing new opportunities to develop technology interventions to meet their social needs. Existing off the shelf social connection platforms do not contain facilities designed to break the cognitive c...

Research on intergroup contact has considered how the occurrence and experience of contact is affected by ingroup members. Qualitative studies of contact in real-life settings have additionally highlighted how multiple actors can affect the manifestation of contact. This article shows how the presence of one’s child can shape immigrant mothers’ con...

Strong interpersonal bonds between group members have been found to either increase intergroup antipathy or improve intergroup attitudes, depending on the intergroup situation. However, the question of whether close ties with fellow group members can contribute positively and negatively to intergroup attitudes at the same time remains unexplored. W...

The COVID-19 pandemic is worsening loneliness for many older people through the challenges it poses in engaging with their social worlds. Digital technology has been offered as a potential aid, however, many popular digital tools have not been designed to address the needs of older adults during times of limited contact. We propose that the Social...

The economic crisis precipitated by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has placed considerable financial pressures on households across the world. These are compounded by the enforced isolation accompanying pandemic restrictions, during which individuals can struggle to access external assistance and often need to rely heavily on the socia...

Mothers' social integration with other mothers in the same residential area has been shown to be beneficial for their health and well-being. The socio-psychological resources afforded by other mothers aid the transition to motherhood. However, much less is known about the processes whereby mothers integrate with other local mothers. Therefore, we a...

Stronger family relationships predict positive health outcomes: a relationship that is partially due to the range of emotional, practical and informational support that families can provide. Yet not all families possess these resources. A survey study in a disadvantaged community in Nottingham, UK ( N = 142) demonstrated that family identification...

Retirement can be a challenging transition for many of the working population. Research using the Social Identity Model of Identity Change (SIMIC) has documented the important health and well-being benefits of belonging to multiple groups when coping with this challenge. The present research focused on two aspects of the model that have been relati...

User-groups have argued the diagnosis, ‘Personality Disorder’, is harmful, however, these voices are largely missing from mainstream academia. The Social Identity Approach to Health (SIAH) has demonstrated group-based processes can help or harm wellbeing. Given psychiatric diagnoses are, by definition, group-based, SIAH provides a useful theoretica...

COVID-19 provides a ‘perfect storm’ of social and economic suicide risk-factors. Recent research has evidenced an initial impact of the pandemic upon suicide rates, but has yet to understand how elevated financial threat and social isolation may predict suicide ideation/behaviour, or which social factors promote resilience. This study addressed the...

Older adults face significant challenges in regards to the various stereotypes associated with ageing, which have consequences for their mental health and wellbeing. The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened these age-based stereotypes due to older adults' proportionally higher vulnerability to the virus. The present research explored how the pandemic h...

Between 6-13% of older people report chronic loneliness, and at the start of the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic, concern was expressed about the impact of socially isolating viral containment measures on this population of people who are simultaneously medically vulnerable to the virus. Despite these alarms, there is little known about how l...

The COVID-19 pandemic is increasing older people's existing challenges in engaging with their physical and social worlds, and is thereby likely to worsen their loneliness. Digital technology has been offered as a potential aid for social connectedness during social distancing/isolation. However, many popular digital communication tools have not bee...

Levels of loneliness across the world have reached epidemic proportions, and their impact upon population health is increasingly apparent. In response, policies and initiatives have attempted to reduce loneliness by targeting social isolation among residents of local communities. Yet, little is known about the social psychological processes underpi...

The role of shared identity in predicting both ingroup helping behaviour and adherence to protective norms during COVID‐19 has been extensively theorized, but remains largely under‐investigated. We build upon previous Social Identity research into community resilience by testing the role of pre‐existing local community (or ‘neighbourhood’) identity...

Objectives: Belonging to groups can significantly affect people's health and well-being for the better ('the social cure') or worse ('the social curse'). Encouraging people to join groups is a central component of the Social Prescribing movement; however, not everyone who might benefit from Social Prescribing aspires to participating in groups. Th...

The COVID-19 pandemic is increasing older people's existing challenges in engaging with their physical and social worlds, and is thereby likely to worsen their loneliness. Digital technology has been offered as a potential aid for social connectedness during social distancing/isolation. However, many popular digital communication tools have not bee...

Communities are vital sources of support during crisis, providing collective contexts for shared identity and solidarity that predict supportive, prosocial responses. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a global health crisis capable of exerting a heavy toll on the mental health of community members while inducing unwelcome levels of social disconn...

The present study compared participants’ evaluations of their own conflict with their evaluation of another conflict. These evaluations were examined through the prism of the ideological ethos of conflict (EOC), which was seen as the major contributing factor in the development of the biased perceptions, divergent understandings, and emotional resp...

The stressors of immigration detention and negative host country experiences make effective access to health care vital for migrant detainees, but little is known regarding the health experiences of this populations and the barriers to healthcare access. The present research investigates immigration detainees’ experiences of health‐related help‐see...

One explanation of the results of the UK EU Referendum and the US Presidential Election in 2016 has been as a triumph of citizens of ‘somewhere’—localised and rooted—over the cosmopolitan and spatially mobile citizens of ‘anywhere’, placing residential mobility and its effects on political attitudes at the heart of debates about the causes of popul...

In Ireland, ritual events and parades have been a central part of civic and public life. However, there is limited understanding of the identity processes at work at these collective events. The present research aims to examine how participants attending collective events come to recognise shared social identification and the impact that this aware...

Although Social Cure research shows the importance of family identification in one’s ability to cope with stress, there remains little understanding of family responses to human rights violations. This is the first study to explore the role of family identity in the collective experience of such violations: meanings ascribed to suffering, family co...

Personality, as measured by the ‘Big Five’ dimensions of agreeableness, openness, extroversion, neuroticism and conscientiousness, has been explored in the social psychological literature as a predictor of migration but so far has received very little attention in the geographical literature, which is surprising given its predictive importance and...

Compared to the impressive amount of research on consequences of intergroup contact, relatively little work has been devoted to predictors of intergroup contact. Although opportunities for intergroup contact are constantly growing in modern diverse societies, these contact opportunities are not necessarily exploited. In the present review article,...

Over the past decade, increasing attention has been paid to the antecedents of intergroup contact and, in particular, self-efficacy to engage in intergroup encounters. Contact self-efficacy has been shown to reduce intergroup anxiety and increase willingness to engage in future contact, and is influenced by the positive contact experiences of other...

Intergroup contact can be as casual as members of different groups walking past one another on the street or as intimate as developing cross-group friendships or romantic relationships. To date, however, the majority of intergroup contact research has focused on examining the effects of contact through self-report measures of interactions and frien...

The role of shared identity in predicting both ingroup helping behaviour and adherence to protective norms during COVID-19 has been extensively theorized, but remains yet under-investigated. We build upon previous Social Identity research into community resilience by testing the role of pre-existing local community (or ‘neighbourhood’) identity as...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized as a ‘perfect storm’ of risk factors for suicide, with increased social isolation exacerbating health and economic stressors. Recent research has evidenced the initial impact of the pandemic upon suicide, but has yet to fully explore how elevated financial threat and social isolation may together result...

Cohesive, resilient communities are vital to the well-being of residents. Uncovering the determinants of successful community identities is therefore essential to progressing the community health agenda. Engaging in community participation through volunteering may be one pathway to building local community identity and enhancing residents' health a...

We examined whether the Social Cure (SC) perspective explains the efficacy of a Social Prescribing (SP) pathway which addresses healthcare needs through enhancing social connections. Data were collected at pathway entry from patients with long-term health conditions, or who felt isolated/lonely/socially anxious (N=630), and then again four months l...

Research in the socialcure tradition shows that groups can reduce members' stress by providing support to cope with challenges, but it has yet to consider how this applies to the anxiety occasioned by outgroups. Research on intergroup contact has extensively examined how reducing intergroup anxiety improves attitudes towards outgroups, but it has y...

Punimi sjell një këndvështrim psikologjik të pasojave të dhunës diktatoriale. Mungesa apo shkelja e të drejtave të njeriut gjatë dhe pas diktaturës apo konflikteve etnike ndikon negativisht në shëndetin mendor të të prekurve. Studimet mbi traumën shqyrtojnë rolin e ndryshimeve pas diktaturës apo konflikteve. Studimi vë në dukje ndikimin negativ që...

Family financial stress research has typically examined negative effects of deprivation on mental health, which in turn erode financial coping. While this work acknowledges family support’s role in buffering these effects, it has typically overlooked how family identification can act to structure the experience of, and response to, economic challen...

Family financial stress research has typically examined negative effects of deprivation on mental health, which in turn erode financial coping. While this work acknowledges family support’s role in buffering these effects, it has typically overlooked how family identification can act to structure the experience of, and response to, economic challen...

Objectives This study aimed to assess the degree to which the ‘social cure’ model of psychosocial health captures the understandings and experiences of healthcare staff and patients in a social prescribing (SP) pathway and the degree to which these psychosocial processes predict the effect of the pathway on healthcare usage. Design Mixed-methods:...

Previous research on volunteering has largely focused on the individual characteristics and experiences of volunteers, or on their relationship with a volunteering organisation, neglecting the group dynamics of volunteering. To address this gap, we apply a social identity and “Social Cure” perspective in a thematic analysis of interviews with 40 vo...

While the profound effects of spatial mobility on social structures and patterns of interactions have long been recognised, the association of mobility experiences and tolerance towards immigrants has received limited attention. In this paper, we examine such patterns in Iceland, a country with a long history of emigration and return migration of t...

A substantial literature supports the important role that social group memberships play in enhancing health. While the processes through which group memberships constitute a ‘Social Cure’ are becoming increasingly well-defined, the mechanisms through which these groups contribute to vulnerability and act as a ‘Social Curse’ are less understood. We...

Attention is being given to healthcare initiatives with the potential to save money and improve lives. One example is social prescribing, which supports patients whose ill-health is exacerbated by loneliness. While evidence has accumulated attesting to social prescribing's efficacy, one limitation has been the lack of a theoretical framework, which...

Previous research has found that stigma can be a barrier to service use but there has been little work examining actual service encounters involving members of stigmatized groups. One such group are those with problematic or unmanageable debts. Providing advice to members of this group is likely to be particularly difficult due to the stigma associ...

The conventional understanding of the nation within social psychology is as a category of people or “imagined community.” However, work within the discursive tradition shows that citizens tend to discuss nationhood in a variety of modes, including the use of nonhuman categories such as references to the physical landscape of the country. This artic...

Research on residential diversification has neglected its impact on neighbourhood identity and overlooked the very different identity‐related experiences of new and existing residents. The present research examines how incoming and established group members relate to their changing neighbourhood in the increasingly desegregated city of Belfast, Nor...

Research on residential diversification has mainly focused on its negative impacts upon community cohesion and positive effects on intergroup relations. However, these analyses ignore how neighbourhood identity can shape the consequences of diversification among residents. Elsewhere, research using the Applied Social Identity Approach (ASIA) has de...

The study of citizenship has increasingly focused on the ways in which spatialized understandings of the concept can be used to marginalize and exclude social groups: exclusive constructions of national boundaries, local neighborhoods, and public spaces can deny marginalized groups their social and political rights. Less attention has been paid to...

Much current research on collective victimhood acknowledges the role of rhetoric but does not fully address the implications for micro-level variation in personal expressions of victimhood. The focus has tended to be on individual differences in collective victimhood construals where people may either see their group as the sole possessor of victim...

Recent research suggests that sound appraisal can be moderated by social identity. We validate this finding, and also extend it, by examining the extent to which sound can also be understood as instrumental in intergroup relations. We interviewed nine members of a Catholic enclave in predominantly Protestant East Belfast about their experiences of...

The social identity approach to stress has shown how intragroup support processes shape individuals' responses to stress across health care, workplace, and community settings. However, the issue of how these 'social cure' processes can help cope with the stress of intergroup contact has yet to be explored. This is particularly important given the p...

Protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis

The present study investigates how attendees at national celebratory crowd events—specifically St. Patrick's Day parades—understand the role of such events in representing and uniting the national community. We conducted semi-structured interviews with people who attended St. Patrick's Day parades in either Dublin or Belfast. In year 1, full-length...

In order to understand when and why social change occurs, we must first understand the psychological processes that lead people to act in ways that sustain or challenge the status quo. This chapter discusses two psychological models of social change: a prejudice reduction model, focused on getting people to like one another more, and a collective a...

In this article we review the argument outlined in the opening article in this special thematic section: that the current social psychology of citizenship can be understood as the development of longstanding conceptualisations of the concept within the discipline. These conceptualisations have contributed to the current social psychological study o...

The aim of this special thematic section is to bring together recent social psychological research on the topic of citizenship with a view to discerning the emerging trends within the field and its potential contributions to the broader interdisciplinary area of citizenship studies. Eight papers spanning diverse theoretical traditions (including so...

There is increasing acceptance that children are not unaware of when they are targets of discrimination. However, discrimination as a consequence of socio-economic disadvantage remains understudied. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of perceived discrimination on well-being, perceptions of safety and school integration amongst childre...

A key issue for political psychology concerns the processes whereby people come to invest psychologically in socially and politically significant group identities. Since Durkheim, it has been assumed that participation in group-relevant collective events increases one's investment in such group identities. However, little empirical research explici...

We investigated the intensely positive emotional experiences arising from participation in a large-scale collective event. We predicted such experiences arise when those attending a collective event are (1) able to enact their valued collective identity and (2) experience close relations with other participants. In turn, we predicted both of these...

Identifying with a group can impact (positively) upon group members’ health. This can be explained (in part) through the social relations that a shared identity allows. We investigated the relationship between a shared identity and health in a longitudinal study of a month-long pilgrimage in north India. Questionnaire data (N = 416) showed that sel...

The impact of community stigmatisation upon service usage has been largely overlooked from a social identity perspective. Specifically, the social identity-mediated mechanisms by which stigmatisation hinders service use remain unspecified. The present study examines how service providers, community workers and residents recount their experience of...

Competitive victimhood is now a well-established intergroup phenomenon. Research continues to show how competition exists on a range of dimensions including physical, cultural and psychological aspects of suffering. But what happens when victims' suffering starts to be addressed and victims learn to cope with their past? We suggest that even here,...

Using a sample of Malaysia health care employees, this study shows that exposure to inappropriate behavior at work is considered to be high (42.6%). Questionnaires were obtained from 108 employees from various professions in clinical and non- clinical backgrounds at Kuala Lumpur Hospital, via stratified random sampling. The study shows that, within...

Social psychologists have attempted to capture the ideological quality of the nation through a consideration of its taken-for-granted quality, whereby it forms an unnoticed 'banal' background to everyday life and is passively absorbed by its members in contrast to its 'hot', politically created and contested nature. Accordingly, national identity i...

Environmental Psychology has typically considered noise as pollution and focused upon its negative impact. However, recent research in psychology and anthropology indicates the experience of noise as aversive depends upon the meanings with which it is attributed. Moreover, such meanings seem to be dependent on the social context. Here we extend thi...