Improving social recovery capital research to enhance clinical utility: a proposed agenda

Abstract

Social recovery capital (SRC) is the combination of social resources that can be used to initiate and sustain addiction recovery through friends, family, and peers. Broadly, understanding one’s SRC allows us to get a sense of where one has social support for recovery and where there may be social barriers to their recovery process. SRC is often a vital component of many people’s recovery journey, yet our understanding of how best to use this concept in research and practice remains underdeveloped. To improve understanding of the role of social recovery capital and strategies to measure and increase it, we present a roadmap involving a five-pronged research agenda to: (1) Refine the measurement of social recovery capital; (2) Model the complexity of social recovery capital empirically; (3) Integrate personality science with social recovery capital research; (4) Optimize evidence-based behavior change techniques of social recovery capital; and (5) Incorporate an intersectional framework when examining or applying social recovery capital. Overall, this five-pronged research agenda seeks to enhance the clinical utility of SRC research to maximize the impact of SRC on one’s recovery.

Keywords:

• Behavior change techniques
• personality science
• precision medicine
• social recovery capital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Personality science is equally relevant to SRC research for individuals who are not in formal treatment. Personality science will facilitate understanding how individual differences in personality facilitate or undermine building SRC outside of formal treatment.

2 Although full review of behavior change techniques is beyond the scope of this manuscript, readers should examine the behavior change taxonomy for additional considerations on measuring and analyzing intervention components (Michie et al. 2013).

Additional information

Funding

Author support was provided by NIAAA to Samuel N. Meisel [K99AA030030], Emily A. Hennessy [K01AA028536], and John F. Kelly [K24AA022136].