In my original qualitative research into 'Living with faecal incontinence' I looked at the 'insider's' view of living with this condition. This was a perspective understood by having experienced faecal incontinence, which could facilitate dialogue between people who found that they had had this in common; they did not feel stigmatised by talking about it and give advice of how they had coped. I am writing up a ten year follow-up, and found that even when people had similar ‘insider’ experience, homophily was also helpful (i.e. having other similarities to the other person). I cannot find much publicised data linking the two concepts. Thank you for any help you could give me.
Thank you, Julie, for the reference to this interesting article. It is very relevant to the perspective that I am looking into. The women in the focus groups, although not trained healthcare professionals, have a different type of knowledge - that of 'the insider' - and only acquired by experience. They were helped and reassured by meeting others with these experiences. Which I have found in my research, although sometimes it seemed necessary for other variables also to be similar - e.g. age or gender - hence my interest in homophily. In this study, the postnatal women were interacting with others very similar to themselves in gender, age and experience. I have identified significant others who were empathic, 'honorary insiders', but the partners in the Williams et al. article had not had time for this to develop. They could have been helped by a partners' (focus) group??? Interestingly, I discussed (in my thesis) re 2 very old references to healthcare professionals being 'wise' . . . honorary insiders . . . as the principal investigator in this study sounds to have been. One of these related to nurses interacting with stoma patients. Thanks again for directing me to this article.
I found Mark (2003) helpful in my understanding of the problem about which I asked the original question; the following is from my write-up of my 10 year follow-up study: "Mark (2003) describes people’s sociodemographic characteristics as defining their position in a multidimensional social space, and gives the example of people’s age and education define a two dimensional ‘social space’; those who are of a comparable age and level of education are located near each other in this social space. When participants felt comfortable in being able to give or receive help, this was facilitated by additional common characteristics, located them together in this ‘social space’." Ref. Mark N (2003) Culture and competition: homophily and distancing explanations for cultural niches, American Sociological Review 68(3): 319-344.