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Family and social relationships

Role of government: Limited Shaped by public administration only at the margin.

75.1Access · regional mean

55.6Experience · regional mean

+19.5Access–experience gap

0.08How closely access and experience move together across countries (correlation)

0.93How closely this domain follows the overall index (correlation)

What the survey asks: access

Contact with parents, adult children, children and other relatives by visit, telephone and online; visits with friends and neighbours; going out.

What the survey asks: experience

Satisfaction with contact and relationships with family, with friendships and with opportunities to make friends and to meet people; feeling part of the community.

Findings

Contact is high in every state (70.3 in Jordan to 85.5 in Yemen). Experience ranges from 87.0 (Tunisia), 69.7 (Lebanon) and 69.2 (Morocco) to 37.1 (Yemen) and 36.9 (Iraq). The gap exceeds 25 points in Yemen (48.4), Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait; in Tunisia experience exceeds contact.

The domain is the one most closely tied to the index (r = 0.93).

What the gap may indicate (inference, not measured)Dense contact is not experienced as support in the Gulf and the conflict-affected states. The survey cannot say whether this reflects displacement, migration, household structure or the quality of relationships.

Administrative implicationAdministrations delivering through family and community networks cannot assume that contact means support; isolation among migrant workers, displaced and older people does not appear in contact counts.

Citizens voice

“A place with new and different activities”
Egypt

What respondents said they would change. Open-ended answers as transcribed in English by the survey team, lightly edited for punctuation; attributed by country only.

Figure 1Family and social relationships: the gap is widest in Yemen; experience runs ahead in Tunisia

AccessExperienceDotted lines: regional averages

Yemen85.5 · 37.1 Iraq71.2 · 36.9 Saudi Arabia71.5 · 39.7 Qatar75.6 · 47.1 Kuwait76.3 · 50.7 Jordan70.3 · 55.8 Egypt71.4 · 63.2 Lebanon74.3 · 69.7 Morocco73.3 · 69.2 Tunisia81.3 · 87.0

Sorted by the gap between access and experience.

A-SCOPE MENA, Arab Access and Experience Dataset 2026, ten states, N = 1,861. Wave 1 · Release 1.0 · September 2026.Image (PNG)

Figure 2Family and social relationships: access and experience are only weakly related

Provision–experience mismatchMaterial-access deficitAdministrative interface deficitCapacity under crisisIntermediate alignment

Dashed line: access equals experienceDotted lines: regional averages

A-SCOPE MENA, Arab Access and Experience Dataset 2026, ten states, N = 1,861. Wave 1 · Release 1.0 · September 2026.Image (PNG)