Differences in the quantity of social support between geographically close and long-distance friendships

Abstract

The present study investigated whether geographic distance affects the quantity of received and perceived social support provided by best friends. A total of 142 undergraduate students completed a web-based survey assessing social support within their friendship networks. Findings indicated that geographically close best friends provide more received support than their long-distance counterparts, but there was no consistent difference between groups for perceived support. Implications and future avenues for research are discussed.

Keywords

Social psychology social support friendship long-distance friendship

Friendship contributes to mental health and psychological development in critical ways throughout the life span (e.g., Perlman, 2007). However, maintaining friendships can be difficult, especially across long distances. Recent advances in communication technology have made friendship maintenance over distance more feasible, and recent studies suggest that long distance (LD) friendships are extremely common, maintainable, and could have significant effects on affects and psychological adjustments (e.g., Johnson, 2001; Oswald & Clark, 2003; Rohlfing, 1995). The present research adds to the growing body of knowledge about LD friendships by examining differences in the quantity of social support provided by both geographically close (GC) and LD friendships.

Moving around, staying connected – LD friendships

A central belief in the theories of relational maintenance is that frequent contact and maintenance behaviors are necessary for healthy relationships (Stafford, 2005). In the past, engaging in face-to-face (FtF) contact was viewed as critically important for relational maintenance, as FtF contexts afforded the opportunities to engage in joint activities and spend time with friends (Canary, Stafford, Hause, & Wallace, 1993; Johnson, 2001). Research has shown that FtF interactions are generally the most preferred interaction type (O’Sullivan, 2000), capable of transmitting the most intimacy (Daft & Lengel, 1986) and allowing for joint activities to occur most easily.

Although FtF-type maintenance between friends may be preferable, it is not always feasible in today’s mobile, global world. Mobility imposes distance between individuals and their social networks, making FtF maintenance difficult with those friends they leave behind.

However, technological advancements such as e-mail and affordable LD telephone calls have assisted the maintenance of friendship over distance, spurring LD friendships to become more common than ever before (Mok, Wellman, & Basu, 2007). Rohlfing (1995) reported in her studies on LD friendship that 90% of her participants have at least one LD friend that they would define as “close.” Multiple studies have also shown that among college populations, anywhere from 25% to 50% of close relationships would be classified as “LD” (Dellmann-Jenkins, Bernard-Paolucci, & Rushing, 1994; Guldner & Swensen, 1995). As a result of technological advancements, improving the capacity and quality of LD communication, LD friendships are becoming increasingly prevalent.

Although the frequency of LD friendships is high, the processes by which these relationships are maintained and function are notably distinct from GC friendships and remain largely unstudied. Rohlfing (1995) examined the relational maintenance patterns of LD friendships between women and found that phone conversations consisted of less “small talk” and more interactions about important and personal subjects, implying that the lack of regular communication caused a heightened focus on intimate topics during conversation. Johnson, Haigh, Craig, and Becker (2009) examined the differences in definitions of closeness between GC and LD friends and found that although GC and LD friends reported equal levels of relational closeness, friendship was defined differently by the two groups: LD men valued self-disclosure and trust more than GC men, and LD women valued ease and frequency of interaction less than GC women. Regarding relational satisfaction, Johnson (2001) found that while GC and LD friends maintained their relationships by enacting different behaviors, no significant difference in satisfaction was reported. Taken together, these studies suggest that not only can LD friendships be maintained in the absence of frequent FtF contact but also can they function in notably different ways to GC friendships. However, while closeness, satisfaction, and communication have all received attention from LD friendship scholars, differences in the provision of social support have not been examined in the case of LD friendships.

Friendship and social support

Social support is one of the most significant psychological contributions of friendships and has been strongly linked to a large number of positive outcomes, from role identity formation in adolescents (Siebert, Mutran, & Reitzes, 1999) to decreased mortality rates in older adults (Forster & Stoller, 1992). Although often viewed as a single construct, social support can be divided into several relevant subclassifications. One major distinction lies between received social support and perceived social support (Barrera, 1986; Vangelisti, 2009). Received social support refers to assistance that an individual has actually experienced, such as being lent money by a friend. Perceived social support refers to the belief that support would be available if an individual needed it, regardless of whether the support has or has not been present in the past. An example of this would be an individual believing that a friend would comfort them emotionally if they called upon that friend in need.

Both received and perceived social supports have been found to lessen the impact of stress (Asberg, Vogel, & Bowers, 2008; Cohen & Wills, 1985). However, perceived social support has been regarded as preferable to received support because it more consistently promotes health during stressful periods (Norris & Kaniasty, 1996). One hypothesis that accounts for this preference is that receiving social support makes an individual’s stressors more visible, which can lead to a cost in self-esteem or self-efficacy (Bolger, Zuckerman, & Kessler, 2000; Fisher, Nadler, & Witcher-Alagna, 1982). This cost partially mitigates the psychological effect of the support provided. As perceived social support does not require actual support to be provided, it promotes a sense of security, and an individual can gain the associated health benefits without having to incur the psychological costs of actually asking for, or receiving, that support. As security and trust are indicative of positive relationships (Holmes & Murray, 2007), perceived social support is an important component of an individual’s social support network.

Social support is also often subdivided by the type of aid provided: emotional support, informational support, and instrumental support (e.g., House, 1981). Emotional support occurs when an individual receives assistance coping with emotional distress and has been found to be the most common perception of social support (Gottlieb, 1978). Informational support involves the provision of factual information (e.g., receiving advice), and instrumental support is the direct provision of help in the form of goods or services (e.g., receiving a loan).

It seems reasonable to assume that these classes of social support may be affected differentially by distance and the reduced opportunities for FtF contact. Informational support may be the least affected because many forms of communication exist to allow friends to share information over distance. Emotional support may be partially affected because communications research indicates that richer mediums, such as FtF communication, are best suited for conveying complex and subtle information (Dimmick, Kline, & Stafford, 2000), such as emotions. Instrumental support may be most affected by distance, for example, you are not able to give a friend a ride to class if you live in another town. With these differences in mind, the following research question and hypotheses are advanced:

R1: Does an individual’s distance status (GC or LD) from his or her best friends affects the amount of received and perceived social supports provided by those friends?

H1: In all categories, GC friendships will provide more received support than LD friendships, with received instrumental support exhibiting the greatest difference between GC and LD friendships.

H2: There will be no difference in the amount of perceived emotional and informational support between GC and LD friendships, but GC friendships will provide more perceived instrumental support than LD friendships.

To test these questions and predictions, a sample of undergraduate students completed an online survey, identifying the amount of social support they received from their best GC friend and best LD friend.

Method

Participants

Participants included a sample of convenience of 142 undergraduate students who fully completed the survey and provided complete data for at least one GC and one LD friend. The resulting sample was 28.9% male and 71.1% female between the ages 18 and 23 years (M = 19.83; SD = 1.08) and attended a large Midwestern university. The majority of participants reported being single (59.9%) or in a committed relationship (38.0%), and two participants reported being married. Participants were 81.8% Caucasian, 9.5% African American, 6.6% Asian American, and 2.2% Latino/Hispanic. Most participants (78.2%) experienced only one significant residence move (defined as a move that is “far enough that you can no longer see your old friends easily every day), 12% moved twice, and 7% moved between three and five times. Three participants reported never having changed residences.

Procedure

Participants were recruited through in-class advertisements in Educational Psychology courses and were compensated with either class credit or extra credit, depending on the policy of individual class teachers. Data were collected via an online electronic survey. Participants were asked to list up to eight friends that they would consider “best” or “close.” Participants completed questionnaires about each friend and were instructed to begin with their emotionally closest friend and end with their least emotionally close friend. The present study utilizes only part of the data collected in this dataset, examining only the first-listed (i.e., emotionally closest) GC and LD friends from each participant.¹ The survey took approximately 30 min to complete at computer workstations outside the research laboratory.

Measures

Friendship demographics

Information was gathered relating up to eight of the participants’ closest friends, excluding family and a significant other. For the present study, only the emotionally closest GC friend and the emotionally closest LD friend were examined. The duration of the friendship was also assessed, quantified in approximate months. Duration of friendship can be a significant predictor of friendship retention (Ledbetter, Griffin, & Sparks, 2007).

Distance status

Distance status, either GC or LD, was collected for each friend. GC was defined as “someone you could easily visit every day, because they live close to you” and LD was defined as “someone who you could not visit everyday, because they live too far away.” Distance status was defined via the presence or absence of regular FtF contact, as opposed to a numerical distance, because FtF contact has traditionally been the sine qua non of relationship maintenance (Stafford, 2005). Defining distance by the opportunity for FtF contact, as opposed to a numerical distance, has precedent (Johnson, 2001; Johnson et al., 2009), and allows for the same definition of a LD friend to be used regardless of a participant’s opinions about or capability to travel. For example, the method based purely on geographic distance would not recognize the significant difference between a friendship dyad in which the friends live 10 miles away and have no easy mode of transit between residences and a friendship dyad in which the friends live 10 miles away and both own a car.

Social support

The Inventory of Socially Supportive Behaviors-Modified (ISSB; Barrera, Sandler, & Ramsay, 1981) is a 5-point Likert-type scale used to measure social support behaviors. The modified scale has 12 items and was constructed from the original ISSB, which contained 40 items, using four items with the highest loadings on each of the three factors relevant to the present study’s hypotheses. The three factors came from a factor analysis of the ISSB by Barrera and Ainlay (1983), which reported four factors within the full scale. The three factors used correspond to the current conceptualization of social support: directive guidance (informational support: “Gave you information on how to do something”), nondirective support (emotional support: “Told you that he/she feels very close to you”), and tangible assistance (instrumental support: “Loaned you some money”). The scale was administered twice for each friend: once in its original form to assess received support and the other in a hypothetical tense to assess perceived support. For example, “Gave you information on how to do something” became “If you needed it, would he/she give you information on how to do something?” The rating scale was also changed to a 7-point Likert scale, from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7), to allow for greater specificity. The modified ISSB was used to examine social support on a friend-by-friend basis, so that the difference in received and perceived social supports between two individual friends could be analyzed. Received support ranged from 1 to 5, with M = 2.46, SD = .86, and α = .93 (across both friends). Perceived support ranged from 1 to 7, with M = 6.34, SD = 1.19, and α = .98 (across both friends).

Results

Descriptive analysis

Participants missing more than 25% of values on any scale were discarded from the original sample of 169 participants. Subjects with 25% or fewer missing values on any scale were kept with missing values being imputed by using a mean-based imputation. Fairclough and Cella (1996) argued that imputing up to 50% of data from within a scale is unbiased and precise; as such, imputing 25% or fewer missing values should not significantly alter results. After discarding participants with missing data, the final participants included are N = 142 (Table 1).

Table 1.

Correlations between social support measures.

Variable	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
GC
1. Remo	–	.74**	.62**	.45**	.32**	.33**	.50**	.47**	.33**	.15	.15	.20^†
2. RInfo		–	.75**	.21**	.27*	.33**	.43**	.55**	.37**	.04	.11	.15
3. RInst			–	.14	.10	.23*	.30**	.45**	.47**	−.10	−.05	.07
4. PEmo				–	.88**	.80**	.26*	.17^†	−.03	.41*	.43**	.34**
5. PInfo					–	.87**	.12	.10	−.05	.35**	.49	.42
6. PInst						–	.10	.15	.01	.32**	.42**	.44**
LD
7. Remo							–	.71**	.49**	.33**	.24*	.24*
8. RInfo								–	.70**	.18^†	.20^†	.20*
9. RInst									–	.06	.05	.165
10. PEmo										–	.81**	.75**
11. PInfo											–	.86**
12. PInst												–

R: received; P: perceived; Emo: emotional support; Info: informational support; Inst: instrumental support.

^† p < .05; *p < .01; **p < .001.

Social support variables were examined for normality violations, and perceived emotional support, perceived informational support, and perceived instrumental support violated normality with skewness values in excess of two SDs from zero. However, even after logarithmic transformations, perceived social support variables exhibited a significant negative skew because of the high percentage of maximum scores.

To examine the effects of covariates, a general linear model was run examining whether age, race, membership in a fraternity or sorority, participant’s year in school, marital status, or number of significant moves were the significant factors in predicting received and perceived social supports. None of these factors were significant (p > .05) and were not considered in subsequent analyses. Furthermore, the gender composition of the friendship dyad (i.e., either male/male or female/female) and the length of the relationship were not associated with outcomes and thus were not included in further analyses.

Quantity of social support

The research question examined whether a best GC friend would provide significantly greater amounts of social support (received or perceived) than a best LD friend. Six-paired sample t tests were used to examine these differences (refer to Table 2 for full results).

Table 2.

Paired sample t test results.^a

	GC, mean (SD)	LD, mean (SD)	t	d
Received emotional	12.34 (4.36)	11.04 (4.41)	3.54**	.29
Received informational	11.25 (4.13)	8.49 (3.51)	8.99^†	.72
Received instrumental	9.32 (3.86)	6.61 (3.05)	8.85^†	.78
Perceived emotional	27.68 (.44)	27.76 (.39)	−2.04*	.19
Perceived informational	27.70 (.43)	27.73 (.42)	−.62	.07
Perceived instrumental	27.64 (.44)	27.68 (.44)	−1.05	.09

d, Cohen’s d; GC, geographically close; LD, long distance.

^aPerceived support variables received a logarithmic transformation to reduce skewness.

^† p < .05; *p < .01; **p < .001.

Significant differences were found between GC friends and LD friends for each type of received social support, including received emotional support, t(142) = 3.41; p = .001, received informational support, t(142) = 8.99; p < .001, and received instrumental support, t(142) = 8.85; p < .001. GC friends provided more received social support than LD friends in each case. Received instrumental support showed the greatest difference between GC and LD friends, with an effect size of d = .78. Thus, Hypothesis H1 was supported.

No significant differences were found between GC and LD friends for perceived informational support (t(142) = −.62; p = .53) and perceived instrumental support (t(142) = −1.05; p = .30). However, LD friends provided more perceived emotional support than GC friends (t(142) = −2.04; p = .04). As such, hypothesis H2 was partially refuted, as perceived instrumental support did not exhibit the hypothesized decrease and perceived emotional support was higher for LD friends.

Discussion

The results of the present study suggest that geographic distance affects the amount of received support provided in all categories of support. LD friends do provide some received support, though in smaller amounts than a friend who is more proximal. Furthermore, different types of supports are affected differentially by distance: informational and instrumental supports are most strongly affected, while emotional support is less affected. These results support the theory that current options for communication over distance, although less intimate than FtF contact, allow an individual to preserve a greater level of emotional support across distance in comparison with received informational and received instrumental support.

However, these findings do not provide an explanation for why GC friends provide significantly more received social support than LD friends. Although the FtF opportunities provided by geographic proximity may facilitate the provision of social support, the discrepancy may also simply be a product of friends asking GC friends for support more often, thereby increasing the frequency. This distinction is important, as the former would suggest that LD friends cannot provide social support as easily, whereas the latter would mean that LD friends are simply being prompted for support less often. If LD friends are being asked for less support than GC friends, it is more difficult to discern whether or not the deficit in received support is due to an inability to convey social support over distance. However, if LD friends are being asked for their support as frequently as GC friends but still provide less, it would suggest that even with improved communication options to bridge the distance, LD friends cannot be as directly supportive as a GC friends.

In contrast to the results for received support, perceived social support is undeterred by distance and possibly enhanced: LD friends are as able as GC friends to provide this type of support, and even expected to provide significantly more perceived emotional support in this sample. Clearly, distance has little effect on who you think you could turn to for help, and LD friends may be as important as GC friends for this type of support. As perceived social support has previously been shown to be just as effective, if not more so, as received social support (Norris & Kaniasty, 1996), this implies that LD friends can be a viable part of a support network despite the lack of FtF interaction. However, if a person who perceives support available from LD friends tries to access this support (i.e., tries to shift from perceived support to received support), he or she may encounter a gap between expectations and available help. As such, the lack of difference in perceived social support between GC and LD friends is likely indicative of feelings of security, trust, and expected responsiveness; hallmarks of satisfying friendships and intimate relationships (Holmes & Murray, 2007).

Limitations

Generalizations from this study are limited by its sample of convenience gathered from a college-aged, predominantly white subject pool. The effects of social support and distance may be affected by factors associated with age and culture, for example, social support received and perceived may differ for older adults, who are more likely to receive significant spousal support than collegiate-aged students, as well as from more LD friends accumulated from additional life transitions.

Some amount of shared method variance may have occurred during measurement, due to self-report measures being used to assess for all variables and that ordering effects may have occurred due to multiple administrations of the same measure. Additionally, it is noted that while the two friends included in the analyses were generally among the first that each participant rated, it is possible that the response fatigue contributed to missing data and created error.

Finally, a strong ceiling effect was present on the perceived social support measures for the top GC and top LD friends. Although this trend is most likely not indicative of any type of measurement error, as it is understandable that perceived support from two of an individual’s best friends would be uniformly high, the skewness in the distribution of scores may have contributed to the lack of significant findings in perceived informational and instrumental social support. Although the lack of significance may reflect the similar nature of perceived social support between best GC and best LD friends, the large numbers of maximum scores make it impossible to rule out statistical skewness as a possible reason for the lack of significance.

Conclusions

The present study found evidence that GC and LD friendships differ in terms of the quantity of social support provided. In terms of perceived support, LD friends were not significantly different from GC friends. This lack of significant difference in perceived support between GC and LD friends suggests that distance does not affect on how supportive we expect our best friends to be when they are needed, which may be indicative of the efficacy of modern communication options in allowing these friendships to be maintained.

In terms of received support, GC friends provided more social support in all subtypes. However, emotional social support demonstrated the lowest effect size of received support subtypes, suggesting that the utility of LD best friends may be more oriented toward emotional attentiveness, rather than informative advice or tangible support. As perceived support is not negatively affected by geographic distance, the results indicate that LD friends can, in fact, be a functioning component of a social support network. Additionally, LD friends may be more effective than GC friends in the provision of emotional support, though these differences are small.

LD friendships are unique relationships, and thus far have been understudied. The present study indicates that while LD friendships have different social support dynamics than GC friendships, they can still be valuable, supportive relationships within a larger social network. This research represents a step toward a better understanding of LD friendships and will hopefully stimulate future examination of this highly prevalent interpersonal dynamic.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Note

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