Somebody to Lean On: Community Ties, Social Exchange, and Practical Help during the COVID-19 Pandemic

During a community-wide crisis, practical help from others in the community can allow individuals to manage a variety of extraordinary household needs. In this article, we synthesize insights from research on disaster resilience, social support, social networks, and social exchange into a theoretical model of factors that shape individual access to help beyond the family. We suggest that community ties—local neighborhood, associational, and friend relationships—are significant avenues for accessing help and that helping behaviors in the community are structured by social exchange. We test this model in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on a survey of 4,234 Canadians and Americans. We find that all three kinds of community ties significantly increase the likelihood of receiving and giving help; that there is a strong, positive two-way correlation between giving help and receiving help; that relationships between community ties and helping behaviors are mediated by social exchange; and that individuals in extraordinary need tend to both receive and give more help than others. Our findings provide broad-based evidence for the importance of local social ties and social exchange processes in structuring access to practical help in times of extraordinary need.