Social Comparison and Stress Appraisal in Women with Chronic Illness.

M Carmen Terol Cantero,Maite Martín-Aragón,Carolina Vázquez,Miguel Bernabé,Abraham P Buunk

doi:10.3390/ijerph18105483

Abstract

(1) Background: The present study examined how social comparison orientation, stress appraisal and different social comparison strategies interact in women facing chronic illness. (2) Methods: Assessments were conducted by a trained professional in face-to face semistructured interviews (n = 179 women with chronic illness). Main outcome measures included social comparison scales and a stress appraisal questionnaire. The mediation model, by a bootstrapping procedure, was used to analyze the interaction among variables. (3) Results: Regarding the relationships among variables studied, they were related to each other except for a downward contrast, which allowed us to propose our hypothetical mediation model. Results showed that stress appraisal fully mediates between social comparison orientation and social comparison strategies except for the upward identification strategy. (4) Conclusions: Our results suggest that uncertainty, feelings of threat and low control over one’s illness or, in general, stress appraisal, had an important mediating effects over social comparison processes in patients with chronic illnesses. Therefore, by understanding the stress appraisal process, and the variables that might modify it, we could improve the use of social comparison as a favorable coping strategy.

Highlights

Accepted: 17 May 2021The Social Comparison Theory [1] proposes that a lack of information and uncertainty can trigger social comparison processes, and this is common in the case of chronic illness [2,3,4,5,6]
The social comparison orientation mean score was above 3.0 points (SD = 0.73) and the stress appraisal mean score was 4.07 (SD = 1.03)
We confirmed the mediation effect of stress appraisal by explaining the frequency of certain social comparison strategies used, and results were consistent with the literature focusing on how these types of variables interact simultaneously [21]. These results suggest that uncertainty as a dimension of stress appraisal of one’s illness may determine social comparison processes as a coping strategies used by patients with chronic illnesses

Summary

Introduction

Accepted: 17 May 2021The Social Comparison Theory [1] proposes that a lack of information and uncertainty can trigger social comparison processes, and this is common in the case of chronic illness [2,3,4,5,6]. Patients will try to search for relevant information and compare themselves with other patients with the same condition, such as the same illness diagnosis [3,7,8,9,10,11]. They may compare their symptoms or ways of coping in order to understand their chronic illness or to know how to adjust themselves to it [7,10,12,13,14]. Many studies suggest that when people face threatening circumstances such as chronic pain or illness, they adopt such social comparison strategies as a way of coping with their illness [9,15,16,17]

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Discussion

Conclusion