Donatella Bramanti

Analysing the relationships and support among generations and understanding which factors favour or hinder them, is fundamental in order to conceive age-friendly societies. The paper aims at discussing issues related to social networks among older adults, intergenerational exchanges and support, based on a secondary analysis of research results obtained from SHARE survey data and on data from the Italian survey Non mi ritiro. The focus is on social networks structures among older adults, on their functional dimensions and on reciprocal exchanges among generations...

Evaluation research is for us of key importance because it constitutes the self-reflexive effort of social policies. This article shows how different approaches to policy making have been matched with different approaches to their evaluation, with the purpose of understanding how to implement policies supporting the well-being of the family. Specifically, we suggest that there is a need for relinquishing the traditional linear evaluation approaches, because they are too heavily based on a preconceived description of the social reality that does not leave space for the complex effects that social policies can have on family relations. We argue that there is the necessity of using complex models considering the family as an active subject, both in the planning and in the evaluation phase. We hypothesize the possibility of joining the contributions of the last generations of evaluation research, with the purpose of building a comprehensive evaluation tool based on the relational approach.