Aider et être aidé : système et structure du soutien social informel à Antananarivo et à Paris

Informal social support contributes in different ways to individuals’ social integration and to poverty reduction. This article makes a comparison between Antananarivo and Paris. The data is taken from a survey carried out as part of a multidisciplinary international research programme, “Health, Inequalities and Social Rupture”. The same questionnaire was used in Antananarivo, with a representative sample of 2 807 households, and in two areas of Paris, with a random sample of 889 households. The study details the aid received by individuals in the previous six months and that given to others during the same period, and identifies three spheres of social support: family, friends and neighbours. The results underline that the different aids exchanged are not distributed randomly but form a system, which has a different structure in the two capitals studied. They also show that there is a risk of social support accentuating inequalities, given that those who most lack financial resources (in Antananarivo) or cultural resources (in Paris) benefit less often than others from informal mutual aid. Finally, the results indicate the importance of the individuals’ relative position in the system of aid: in particular, people who neither give nor receive any aid at all are in a much more favourable psychological position (measured in terms of self-esteem) than those who receive aid without being able to return it.