Four Groups Blog

Our first post in the 4G category (An Introduction to 4G) was an attempt to introduce some of the key ideas behind 4G and give people an overview. In this post, I’d like to explore the Social Relationships in a bit more detail.

As you can see in the diagram, there are different grades of relationships, ranging from ‘no effort’, through to ’significant effort’. The main idea in this instance is to outline that certain relationships are more preferable than others. In addition, this grading of Social Relationships creates a framework for decision making, facilitation and interventions.

What is also worth mentioning is that behind the simplified grading in the diagram, there are actually 14 Social Relationships in total. This then creates a far more complex and ‘rich’ context with which to apply the insights from 4G.

To the best of our knowledge, we don’t know of any other tool or technique which offers such predictions, or insights. We are aware of the work of Fiske and Kenny who have put together other means of understanding relationships but they don’t seem to offer such predictions or insights.