Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Social support is discussed as dyadic interactions in which one person is experiencing distress and the other person attempts to provide support. Drawing from helping research in social psychology as well as social-support research, four sets of variables are presented which influence the likelihood of support attempts: stress factors, recipient factors, relationship factors and provider factors. We also present partial results of a pilot study of support intentions which suggests that the extent of past experience with major stressful conditions is significantly and positively associated with a willingness to provide support to peers themselves experiencing stressful problems.

The personal relationships on which social support depends can become strained, problematic and antagonistic in later life. This paper explores how older support recipients themselves influence that social process, for better or worse. New data are presented regarding the nature and extent of interpersonal betrayal in the social networks of older adults that could destabilize family relationships and their social support functions. Respondents reported having betrayed 14 percent, and having been betrayed by 19 percent of the persons in their immediate support networks. In many cases, the event had occurred much earlier in their life, but had retained its symbolic impact across a lifetime.

A motivational model of social support was developed, based on a general stress model termed Conservation of Resources Theory (COR). COR suggests that individuals have, as a primary goal to preserve and protect those resources that they value. This resource conservation is made possible, in turn, by possessing a strong resource pool such that resource strength preserves further resource development and resource security. Resources, in other words, are both valued directly and valued indirectly as they serve to protect other resources. Social support provides a major reservoir for resources outside those endowed to the self (e.g. high self-esteem, sense of mastery). Examining our model and those proposed recently by others, we suggest that social support may be a central building block of health and well-being because together with personal resources t is related to overall sense of identity. Corollaries of this theory were also developed and supporting research was presented. Implications of our social support resource theory for social support intervention were considered.

Social support is a provision of the social environment and one important aspect of exchange between a person and the social world. This perspective may enhance appreciation for the common features shared by diverse types of interpersonal connectedness, such as bonding, attachment, friendship, intimacy and companionship. At least three hypotheses follow: (1) social support should be moderately stable across time and developmental periods; (2) social support changes as a result of transactions between a person and the social environment; (3) amount of perceived social support should be reasonably consistent across various areas of life. Empirical support for the first two propositions is reviewed and new data on the final point are presented. The findings support the conceptual commonality of social support and personal contact, but also emphasize their unique differences.

A theoretical view suggests that the impact of social support is based on interactions among three variables: (1) motivations and expectations of providers and recipients, (2) the nature of the relationships in which the supportive exchanges occur and (3) the type of situation at which the supportive behaviors are directed. We discuss research findings that illustrate the need for such an interactional approach to clarify conflicting findings and to enlarge the understanding of social support.

Social support is best viewed as a complex process unfolding in an ecological context. This process involves transactions between people and their social networks, including the active development and maintenance of support network resources, the management of support incidents to elicit appropriate supportive behavior from the network and the synthesis of information to yield support appraisals. The process is shaped by features of both the person and the social ecology. This ecological model of support allows a more complete understanding of support processes, including their relationship to stress and well-being. The model also serves as a framework for intervention, highlighting targets and strategies for programs designed to facilitate social support. Options briefly discussed include improving utilization of resources, developing and maintaining resources, managing support incidents and enhancing support appraisals.

This cross-national study examined the perception of reciprocity in support relationships and the degree to which reciprocity predicts life satisfaction. Comparisons of white and black American elderly with elderly from south-western France indicate cultural differences. The French are much more likely to perceive their support relationships as reciprocal and very unlikely to report receiving less support than they provide. Among elderly white Americans, age, lower educational levels and functional limitations are associated with not perceiving support relationships as reciprocal. The pattern is similar but not significant among black Americans. French elderly with more functional limitations report that they receive less than they provide, whereas those who are married are more likely to report that their relations are reciprocal. Comparisons of white and black Americans over the full adult age range reveal that for white Americans, age, education, functional limitations, and marital status are important factors predicting reciprocity in social relations; for black Americans again the pattern is similar, but only functional limitations and marital status significantly predict reciprocity. Generally, reciprocal relationships are most positively related to life satisfaction in comparison to both receiving more or receiving less support in white and black American adults and American and French elderly.

This paper introduces a new model of interactive support seeking and describes a study derived from it. Task vs relationship type of problem and gender of support seeker were examined for their effect on the selection of same-sex vs opposite-sex friends to provide social support. Male and female undergraduates were asked to vividly imagine each of two task and two relationship problems and to indicate for each problem the friend to whom they would prefer to talk. Participants were also asked to anticipate the specific interactive coping behaviors that their same-and opposite-sex friends would offer in response to each problem. We found that both males and females preferred to talk to their same-sex friends rather than their opposite-sex friends about both relationship and task problems. Yet males indicated that they would rather talk about task than relationship issues with their male friends and expected the male friends to use more dismiss behaviors in response to a relationship problem. Females expected their female friends to use more solve and support behaviors in response to relationship than task problems, and for their male friends to use more dismiss and escape behaviors in response to problems. Directions for future research on interactive support seeking are suggested.

There is a need for a greater understanding of factors that influence individuals' satisfaction with social support. Theory and research on recipient reactions to aid guided the selection of variables for this study and its hypotheses. Results for seventy-eight mental health outpatients indicated that network orientation, conflicted support and enacted support had significant unique effects on support satisfaction. When psychological distress was the criterion, network orientation was a significant predictor, but its effect was not mediated by support satisfaction. The discussion focused on how network orientation, conflicted support and enacted support add to our understanding of recipient reactions to support.

We tested the effect of contextual variables on the perceived supportiveness of help-intended behaviors. These variables included relationship closeness, spontaneity of support behavior, degree of correspondence between type of support desired and type obtained and gender of the help-provider. Subjects read descriptions of help-intended interactions, in which the contextual variables were systematically varied, then rated their helpfulness and supportiveness. Results showed significant effects for all contextual variables except gender of the support provider. Results suggest that not only the content of support-intended behaviors, but the context in which they occur are important determinants of perceived supportiveness.

We asked 151 people with multiple sclerosis (MS) to describe support attempts that they found especially helpful and unhelpful. These data were compared with findings from prior investigations of bereaved individuals and cancer patients. Across the three samples, expressions of concern, love and understanding were regarded as most helpful. The chronically ill identified two categories as unhelpful: minimization (e.g. challenging the seriousness or existence of the disease) and maximization (e.g. catastrophizing the disease or being overly protective). We propose that support providers assess disease state in a simplistic manner, via physical appearances. The MS respondents were also asked to make attributions for the unhelpful support attempts. Although many of these actions seemed harsh and unsettling, recipients interpreted them benignly. These benign attributions seem to indicate that patients feel vulnerable and, hence, are loath to criticize members of their support network.

This study examined: (1) factors that are related to spouses' provision of positive and problematic support to rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients, and (2) the stress-buffering role of support from social ties outside the marriage for spouses of RA patients. Data were drawn from a prospective study of psychological adaptation to RA. The conjugal sample consisted of forty-two RA patients (81 percent female) and their spouses. The results suggest that spouses provided more social support in response to patients' distress, expressed as greater pain and depressed mood. In contrast, spouses provided more problematic support to patients when spouses were experiencing greater stress or when patients' disease was more advanced. Network support received by the spouse served as a stress-buffer against depression for spouses whose partner's illness had become worse over the past 2 years. These findings support the need for studying social support processes using a dyadic, transactional approach, and for studying the patient and spouse within the larger context of their social support network.