Uladzimir Dabravolski  

Eng 2150 

Professor Ding 

December 7, 2023

The question of moving abroad is one of the major life changes which a person can experience through their lives. There are countless people who decided to abandon everything — their home, their friends, their families, their environment, their lives. People who never went through this process, might think “Was that a good choice?”, “Is it worth it?” Or “Leaving behind all the things worth it?” People experience loneliness, abandonment, and separation in a new land. One story is to travel and enjoy living in another place, but the other story is to leave all chains and completely move yourself in the new place. In networks and feelings of social loneliness after migration: The case of European migrants with a native partner in Belgium” by Suzana Koelet and Helga AG de Valk and “Loneliness: Clinical Import and Interventions” by Cacioppo, S., Grippo, A. J., London, S., Goossens, L., & Cacioppo, J. T., the authors share in detail the struggles of surviving in isolation from society.  

In the article “Loneliness: Clinical Import and Interventions” authors use a scientific approach in explaining the issue of loneliness. It is a scientific article in the Psychological Science area used to explain the issue of loneliness affecting people’s mental and physical well-being. In the beginning authors showing us a time shift, on how the society of the United States changed over time and they use the quotation from other science article to support their claim. After showing us how society changes over time, the authors of the article are trying to give us a clear explanation of what loneliness is. They give the readers a few explanations from other scientific articles as quotes, and paraphrase the definitions given by others in their own words.  After explaining what loneliness is, they are going deeper into explanation and break up the term into three other sub terms – intimate, relational, and collective and explain them using scientific methods and quotes from other scientific articles. Authors provide readers with information on results which can be caused by loneliness – alcoholism, suicidal thoughts, obesity etc., and supporting the claim with other scientific articles. After stating the definition and issue, authors decide to provide us with several ways to treat the issue and provide the readers with credible quotes and results of a valid experiment. To summarize, the authors clearly used logos approach throughout the text. They used quotes from other scientific articles and did experiments to support their claims. By using quotes and evidence, I can clearly say that authors use persuasive styles of writing. 

On the other side, article “Social networks and feelings of social loneliness after migration: The case of European migrants with a native partner in Belgium” gives a different approach to the problem of loneliness. Similar to the other article, in introduction this article explains how the writers of the article explain the term “loneliness” and what they are going to examine through the research. To summarize, this article examines the binational pairs and analyzes their social networks and feelings of social loneliness. Through the text you can see countless number of citations used to support the credibility of the research. This entire article is the analysis of the data coming from EUMARR project, an international study on European binational pairs. As we read through the article, we can see that the article doesn’t sum up all migrants into one category. The results for men and women are different, as well as the migration outcomes for some specific ethnicities and nations. It clearly explains the reasons for such outcomes as language, social integration, ethnic social attachments etc. They clearly explain the steps of experiment, state the place where data was taken from and explain results with providing the tables.  However, the article doesn’t provide us with a way to overcome the problem of loneliness. Basically, it is just an analytical report which used reliable sources to analyze the data. Throughout the reading we can see authors’ use of logos through quotes and experiments. But the writer doesn’t state the claim. In general they don’t give us a claim, they give us data and explain it. They let us decide what we are thinking giving us reliable information. In the end, both articles give the place the research was financed from. It is an especially important point to add credibility to the paper. If the reader doesn’t see where money came from, he cannot understand was the paper biased or not. And both articles give us the sources. 

In conclusion, “Social networks and feelings of social loneliness after migration: The case of European migrants with a native partner in Belgium” by Suzana Koelet and Helga AG de Valk and “Loneliness: Clinical Import and Interventions” by Cacioppo, S., Grippo, A. J., London, S., Goossens, L., & Cacioppo, J. T. vividly convey the authors’ researches. In case of “Loneliness: Clinical Import and Interventions” authors give us a research which can be used to fight with the issue, while in the “Social networks and feelings of social loneliness after migration: The case of European migrants with a native partner in Belgium” authors provide us with reliable information and let us decide on our own what do we think about it. 

Bibliography: 

Cacioppo, S., Grippo, A. J., London, S., Goossens, L., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2015). Loneliness: Clinical Import and Interventions. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 238-249. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615570616 

Koelet, S., & de Valk, H. A. (2016). Social networks and feelings of social loneliness after migration: The case of European migrants with a native partner in Belgium. Ethnicities, 16(4), 610-630. https://doi-org.remote.baruch.cuny.edu/10.1177/1468796816638398