The role of social capital for widowed women in their social service needs: protective or obstructive

Widows face psychological, economic, and social challenges after the loss of their spouse. To identify the social service needs of these women, it is essential to understand the relationships and interactions—beginning from childhood—that form the foundation of these issues. Social capital, the focus of these relationships, is defined as close, distant, and formal relationships based on trust and norms. This study aims to understand the role of social capital in the social service needs of widows in Turkey through their narratives. This narrative study with 20 widows aged 18–65 explores their narratives through in-depth interviews. Participants were selected through snowball sampling, and thematic analysis was conducted using MAXQDA, 2024. The results revealed the significance of trust in the relationships of widows, beginning from childhood, and demonstrated that social capital can play both supportive and obstructive roles in meeting their social service needs. Furthermore, the results can provide evidence for why social workers working with widows should focus on their relationships with close, distant, and formal networks when assessing them from a person-in-environment perspective. Future researchers may focus on gender, stigmatization, and rural–urban residency to examine the role of social capital in meeting widows’ social service needs.