The current paper attempts to embrace trust and distrust as emotions, as well as showing trust or distrust as cognitively justified decisions in one coherent theoretical framework. It links these emotional and action-like domains together by the notion of self-trust which is interpreted as a form of rationale. The argument claims that self-trust of those people who are able to trust others functions in a completely different way in compare to the one of distrusting subjects.

Alzheimer Cafés may play an important psychosocial supporting role in the life of people li­ving with dementia and of their family caregivers by providing a community of understanding, inclusion, solidarity and mutual support. They can promote policy-, professional- and social dis­courses, the recognition of dementia as a social reality, and overall awareness of this complex challenge. They can also foster transdisciplinary collaboration among professionals as well as between professionals and lay people affected by dementia based on mutual understanding, ca­talysing the formation and operation of acting communities and networks of interest.

The active and purposeful presence and activities of Alzheimer Cafés on Internet platforms, in the increasingly prominent channels and fields of social discourse and community life in the 21st century, can be an important tool in the realization of these benefits.

This two-part paper analyses the publicly accessible online footprint and behaviour of Alzhe­imer Cafés from this perspective as measured by a list of 10 possible functions. It scrutinizes the realisation of possible benefits and advantages offered by Internet platforms between Septem­ber 2019 and August 2020, with a special focus on technology-based adaptive responses to the coronavirus-outbreak midway through that period.

This first part of the paper, which briefly overviews the Alzheimer Café concept and its his­tory in Hungary, and then presents the methodology of the study and the first half of the re­search results. The second part of the paper will continue to present the results, and will make recommendations for making more effective use of the potential of online platforms to realise the goals.

Alzheimer Cafés may play an important psychosocial supporting role in the life of people living with dementia and of their family caregivers by providing a community of understanding, in­clusion, solidarity and mutual support. They can promote policy-, professional- and social dis­courses, the recognition of dementia as a social reality, and overall awareness of this complex challenge. They can also foster transdisciplinary collaboration among professionals as well as between professionals and lay people affected by dementia based on mutual understanding, cat­alysing the formation and operation of acting communities and networks of interest.

The active and purposeful presence and activities of Alzheimer Cafés on Internet platforms, in the increasingly prominent channels and fields of social discourse and community life in the 21st century, can be an important tool in the realization of these benefits.

This two-part paper analyses the publicly accessible online footprint and behaviour of Alz­heimer Cafés from this perspective as measured by a list of 10 possible functions. It scrutinizes the realisation of possible benefits and advantages offered by Internet platforms between Sep­tember 2019 and August 2020, with a special focus on technology-based adaptive responses to the coronavirus-outbreak midway through that period.

The first part of the paper (Kucsera – Holpert 2021) briefly overviewed the Alzheimer Café concept and its history in Hungary, presented the methodology of the study and the first half of the research results. This second part of the paper presents the rest of the results, and makes recommendations for making more effective use of the potential of online platforms to realise the goals.

The study presents the structure and intensity of the relationships of the Hungarian population over 16 years of age through a descriptive analysis of four variables measuring the frequency of personal and distance contact with relatives and friends from the EU-SILC 2015 survey. Ac­cording to the data, the relationship structure is on average balanced, half of the relationships are related to relatives or friends, and the relative proportions of personal and long-distance relationships are similar. According to our results, in addition to age, the financial situation of the household has a significant correlation with the characteristics of the relationship structu­re. One of the lessons of multivariate regression models is that the effect of other background variables on the relationship structure intensifies in parallel with aging, leading to a deepening of relationship inequalities among the elderly. Another lesson of the models is that the inclu­sion of household characteristics (financial situation, number of household members, material transfer relationship with other households) has a significant effect on the mechanism of indi­vidual background variables, thus confirming that a deeper study of relationship intensity and relationship structure within the household is essential. At the end of our analysis, we compiled clusters based on the intensity of relationships, the direction of relationships, and the channel of contacting, with a relative majority of more than one-third of the respondents with extremely weak relationship embeddedness.

The study aims at comparing the Hungarian results of the questions on the frequency of personal and distance contact with relatives and friends in the 2006 and 2015 ad hoc modules of EU-SILC. According to our results, in line with the findings of previous Hungarian research, compared to 2006, there were fewer contacts in Hungary in 2015. Relations with friends, especially those held in person, were less exposed to weakening compared to relations with relatives. Among the different social groups, the already disadvantaged were typically negatively affected by either the change in intensity or the structure of relationships. However, the situation of the elderly and the inhabitants of deprived households deteriorated in all three dimensions examined: their re­lations weakened more strongly, and those related to relatives and personal ones further narro­wed by 2015. This result indicates that the social disintegration of these groups has accelerated particularly between the two years, which poses a serious social policy challenge.

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