Patterns Of Social Support Research Articles

Towards a Chinese Conception of Social Support: A Study on the Social Support Networks of Chinese Working Mothers in Beijing

First published in 1997, this volume is an attempt to study the patterns of social support among Chinese working mothers in a Beijing neighbourhood with the aim of developing a beginning understanding of the Chinese conception of social support. The data indicates great variations in the support relationships experienced by the 27 Chinese working mothers interviewed on their social support and support relationships. Angelina W.K. Yuen-Tsang aims to understand the existing patterns of social support, to develop an initial understanding of the Chinese conception of social support through the grounded theory method and to explore the implications of the Chinese conception of social support on social work practice and social work intervention in the PRC. She argues that the introduction of formal social work interventions to supplement the informal networks is therefore envisaged to be a necessary and inevitable trend of development in the People’s Republic of China.

Interactive patterns of social support and individual coping strategies in melanoma patients and their correlations with adjustment to illness.

Combined patterns of social support and coping style and correlations with adjustment to cancer were investigated in early-stage melanoma patients. The authors studied 358 consecutive patients attending regular follow-up who answered standardized instruments that assess social support, coping behavior, and tumor-related distress. Regression analyses identified high active and low depressive coping behavior as stronger predictors for perceived support than sociodemographic and clinical variables. Cluster analyses yielded four coping-support patterns. High social support, combined either with active coping or with stoicism, was associated with good adjustment, whereas low perceived support in the subjects living alone or in the patients exhibiting depressive coping behavior was associated with poor adjustment.

Racial Minority Status and Distress Among Children and Adolescents

ABSTRACTThis study examines the relationship between racial background and two measures of distress among 10 to 17 year-old youth. The authors test whether minority racial status has an independent effect when socioeconomic status, social support patterns, gender and age are controlled. The data for the study are drawn from the National Commission on Children: 1990 Survey of Parents and Children which provides a nationally representative sample of 918 black, Hispanic and non-Hispanic white youth and their parents. The constructions of mood and worry scales yield measures of self-reported distress. Racial heritage was not significantly associated with “mood.” Hispanic heritage was significantly related to “worry.” Although African American children did report more worry than white children, the relationship did not reach statistical significance. The implications of these findings for program development, and the delivery of services are discussed.

Social support of older people in Australia and Japan

Comparable networks surveys identified the informal relationships which provide social support to older people in urban Japan, provincial Japan, and urban Australia. Spouses, daughters, and sons were major providers of expressive support in all areas. Older Australians had more expressive support from friends while older Japanese had more instrumental support from daughters-in-law. The gender of the older people and their close ties were highly significant in all areas. The many similarities in the social support patterns contrast sharply with East and West differences in cultural prescripts and living arrangements. In these two advanced countries with long life expectancies and high living standards, older people's interpersonal relationships may be converging on the basis of selective affection and choice, rather than obligation, with individuals in and beyond the household and family.

Guard and Reserve Spouse Separation during the Persian Gulf War: Coming to Terms with Uncertainty

During the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991), more than 228,000 National Guard and reserve members were recalled to active duty. Little information exists about the effect of wartime military separation among the civilian spouses of guard and reserve personnel. This grounded theory study describes the effect of the Persian Gulf War separation on 14 guard and reserve spouses. Data were generated from in-depth interviews and were analyzed using the constant comparative method. Three patterns of coming to terms with the separation emerged from analysis of the intensive interviews: (a) settling in immediately, (b) struggling followed by settling in, and (c) struggling without relief. Each pattern is associated with different patterns of social support that affect the relationship between uncertainty and adjustment. These findings provide important information for nurses who work with spouses who can anticipate this type of separation.

Infant crying, risk status and social support in families of preterm and term infants

Infant crying influences the caregiver and the broader caregiving environment. In this study, cry acoustics were recorded and acoustically analyzed from a sample of fullterm and preterm infants at 40 weeks gestational age, along with the medical risk and socioeconomic status (SES) of the family. Following factor analysis of the cry acoustics, cry factors, along with medical risk and SES were used to predict patterns of social support in the informal (family, friends) and formal (health care providers) social support networks at 44 weeks gestational age. One cry factor, temporal patterning, indicative of the influence of respiratory factors on the infant's cry, predicted a significant amount of variance in the amount of support from the informal network, beyond that predicted from medical risk and SES. Medical risk alone predicted the amount of contact with the formal network, and SES predicted satisfaction with help from the formal network. There were different patterns of relationship between cry acoustics and social support for families with term and preterm infants, indicating that caregivers may interpret and respond to different information in the acoustics of their infants' cries. These findings have implications for understanding how infant crying and behavior influence the caregiving environment and for the clinical management of early cry problems in families with infants differing in risk status. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gender Differences in Social Support: Mental Health Consequences among the Homeless

We examine gender differences in patterns of social support among the homeless, testing genderspecific mediation models of the effects of social supports on psychological distress for a systematic sample of 150 homeless men and women in Birmingham, Alabama. Our research demonstrates that homeless women receive both more instrumental and more expressive support. These supports, however, do not advantage homeless women. The distress process appears different for males and females. For males and females, life events stimulate social support, but the effect is nearly twice as large for women. Life events' effects on mastery differ with women's mastery being affected negatively and men's being unaffected by undesirable life events. Gender differences in the mediation process are also notable. For males, life events increase supports; supports, in turn, are associated with lower depression. For women, while life events also increase supports, these supports are associated with higher depression.

Difficulties and patterns of social support of mature college students in Hong Kong: implications for student guidance and counselling services

Abstract The extent and nature of the difficulties faced by mature college students in a university in Hong Kong were examined. Who provided which types of support in which aspects of the lives of mature students was investigated. The results showed that time constraints were a major concern of many such students. Differences were found in the problems experienced in different modes of study and with different marital statuses. Spouses were support generalists who provided all types of support to their mature student partners, while lovers, friends and family members were support specialists who provided specific types of social support. The findings lend support to the hypothesis that the more sufficient the perceived social support received by mature students, the less the degree of difficulty they experience in their lives. Implications for service approach and for the provision of services are discussed, and recommendations on how to improve services are made.

Difficulties and patterns of social support of mature college students in Hong Kong: Implications for student guidance and counselling services

The extent and nature of the difficulties faced by mature college students in a university in Hong Kong were examined. Who provided which types of support in which aspects of the lives of mature students was investigated. The results showed that time constraints were a major concern of many such students. Differences were found in the problems experienced in different modes of study and with different marital statuses. Spouses were support generalists who provided all types of support to their mature student partners, while lovers, friends and family members were support specialists who provided specific types of social support. The findings lend support to the hypothesis that the more sufficient the perceived social support received by mature students, the less the degree of difficulty they experience in their lives. Implications for service approach and for the provision of services are discussed, and recommendations on how to improve services are made.

Sources of support and interpersonal stress in the networks of married caregiving daughters: findings from a 2-year longitudinal study.

This research uses data collected on 57 married daughters and 1,069 members of their social networks to examine patterns of social support and interpersonal stress across the first two years of caring for parents with dementia. Reports by the caregivers indicated that friends were the most prominent source of emotional support, while siblings were the greatest source of instrumental support and interpersonal stress, both shortly after the parent's diagnosis and two years later. Multivariate analyses demonstrated that associates who had cared for family members themselves were more likely to have been sources of instrumental support both shortly after diagnosis and two years later. Caregiving similarity was also the most important factor in explaining both emotional support and interpersonal stress at T1; however, its effect diminished across the subsequent two years. These findings suggest that experiential similarity may become less important in explaining some dimensions of interpersonal relations as individuals move further from status transitions.

Supportive behaviors in natural support networks of people with serious mental illness.

An issue of primary significance in the public mental health field is the extent to which interventions are effective in enhancing the community adjustment of people with serious mental illnesses. A fundamental goal of community support services is to integrate clients into the larger community by providing them with a range of resources that will result in greater levels of independent functioning. Thus, a key function of direct practitioners in all programs should be the of natural social support resources for clients to supplement their formal psychosocial rehabilitation activities. The use of natural supports by clients with serious mental illness is important to their stability because of limits in the scope and availability of formal services and the vulnerability of these services to shifts in political support and funding patterns. More important, social supports promote normalcy in clients' lifestyles. Although community-based programs have become preferred modalities for working with clients with serious mental illness, their potential for developing natural support resources has not been adequately examined. The National Institute of Mental Health (1991) asserted that studies of the origin, nature, constitution, and evaluation of informal social networks should be pursued to determine what factors promote their development (p. 27). Yet it is difficult to study informal support networks with this or any population, because although supports are of acknowledged importance, data that adequately describe their characteristics have not been compiled. This article describes the range of specific social support resources that clients with severe mental illness identify as important and describes a method for assessing social support patterns. Very little research has been done on clients' reports of their own experiences with support networks. Although the findings discussed in this article represent one step in a process of instrument for use by researchers, the authors believe that direct service providers will also benefit from an understanding of the behavior of supportive people and groups present in the lives of clients with serious mental illness. Practitioners can target their interventions to enhance supports that seem beneficial and may also use the authors' methods to perform social support assessments. CONCEPT OF SOCIAL SUPPORT Social support is important for all people in the promotion of physical health, mental health, stress-coping capability, and community living satisfaction (Bloom, 1990). The behaviors and relationships involved in social support have been conceptualized in various ways. Four examples may suffice to indicate conceptual differences among theorists: 1. Vaux (1988) defined social support as social networks, supportive behaviors, and support appraisals. 2. Sarason, Sarason, and Pierce (1990) considered social support to be primarily a cognitive or psychological characteristic of individuals. 3. Veil and Baumann (1992) broke social support down into four components: subjective beliefs, everyday support, potential support, and actual crisis support. 4. Richman, Rosenfeld, and Hardy (1993) specified eight types of support: (1) listening, (2) task appreciation, (3) task challenge, (4) emotional support, (5) emotional challenge, (6) reality confirmation, (7) tangible assistance, and (8) personal assistance. One problem in clarifying the concept of social support is that most research has been done with general populations. There has not been a clear appreciation of the fact that social supports are probably structured, perceived, and received differently in different populations. The characteristics of social support for seriously mentally ill people are different from those for the general population. Network structure is an essential support component, given that seriously mentally ill people tend to benefit from structure and predictability in their lives (Beels, 1981). …

Vulnerability and social class: differential patterns of personality and social support over the social classes

Abstract One of the most consistent findings in epidemiologic research is a negative relation between social class and health. Health complaints are generally more common in the lower social classes. Psychosocial, together with material, cultural and behavioral factors, are among those factors, which could explain part of the socioeconomic differences in health. It is argued that integrating psychosocial factors and social class into explanatory models for differences in health would broaden insight in the development of these differences. A first step towards this integration is the examination of whether these variables are inter-related. In this study, we examined the relation between social class on the one hand, and personality and social support on the other hand. The research question was answered in a random sample of 2663 men, aged 30–70 yr, from the northern part of the Netherlands. It was found that most of the personality and support scales were related to social class. The strongest relation was found for hostility, as measured by the Buss Durkee Hostility Inventory (Buss & Durkee, Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21 , 343–349, 1957). Moreover, a clear pattern was found, indicating that lower-class subjects are in many respects in an adverse position. The findings argue for an integration of social class and psychosocial factors when studying health.

Living with HIV infection

By its chronic nature, HIV infection represents a period of time where persons are coping with the social and physiological changes of the infection across the spectrum of acute infection, illness, and death. As a person moves through the stages of infection, he or she also experiences different psychological states, whether they be a reaction to the disease process itself, to social reactions to HIV/AIDS, or to the threat of developing AIDS in the future. The purpose of this article is to describe in both quantitative and qualitative terms the psychosocial functioning of infected men from the time they learn they are seropositive to their demise, and to contrast this to seronegative men. This paper specifically examines the longitudinal patterns of psychological states, social support, social conflict, and HIV-risk behavior as measured prospectively in a cohort of homosexual men in Chicago. The men participating in the Chicago Multicenter AIDS Cohort and Coping and Change Studies enrolled in 1984, before...

Stability and change in patterns of parental social support and their relation to children's school adjustment

A structured interview was used to explore the social support networks of the parents of 250 4- and 5-year-olds in Genoa. The parents of 60% of the participants were traced 2 years later, after the children had transferred from preschool to elementary school. During the second wave of data collection, the parents also completed an inventory of critical life events in their own lives over the preceding year. Teachers rated the children's adjustment at both data collection points. Major indices of parental social support (i.e., number of individuals in support network; proportions of marital partners, kin, and friends in support network; frequency of contact with supportive individuals; general satisfaction with social support) were found to be moderately stable over the 2-year period for both mothers and fathers. Both concurrent and previous measures of social support were associated with positive school adjustment for the children of mothers who reported the experience of a stressful life event. Parallel data for fathers revealed few significant findings, but this may have occurred because of limited statistical power.

Gender differences in the relationship between social network support and mortality: A longitudinal study of an elderly cohort

Despite well-recognized gender differences in patterns of social network support, few studies have explored whether the pathways by which social support affects mortality risk differ for men and women. In a 15-year follow-up study of elderly HMO members, we found that network size affected men's mortality risk indirectly, through their health status, while no such indirect effect was found for women. The data also suggested that network size had a direct protective effect on mortality risk for both men and women, with men gaining protection at a lower level of network size than women. These findings confirm the need for a gender-specific approach to further research on this subject, and suggest the need to measure variables that capture the different meaning and value of social network participation for men and women.

Flows of social support and health status among older persons in China

As a consequence of the political, social, and economic developments in contemporary China, there have been considerable changes in the patterns of flows of social support between Chinese older people and their significant others. There is evidence that Chinese elders are now under strong pressure to provide more social support, instrumental support in particular, to their children and other relatives while they receive less. Such a change in the direction of flows of social support has been reported to worsen the elders' health. This paper describes the general pattern of social support both to and from the Chinese elders, using data of a probability sample survey conducted in Wuhan, China in 1991. The association between social support, both receiving and providing, and old-age health status is also analysed within a multivariate framework. The results of two probit models suggest that emotional support received plays a crucial role in affecting an elder's health status, while instrumental support received does not have explicit impacts. In addition, there is no empirical evidence that increased instrumental support from elders has worsened their health status as reported.

Structural relationships between social support and coping.

Relationships between social support and coping were examined over a one-year period in a sample (n = 120) exposed to a specific stressor (i.e. a spinal cord injury). Two issues were evaluated: (1) patterns of social support and coping over time; and (2) the direction of the effects of coping on social support or vice versa. Subjects had incurred a spinal cord injury within the preceding year, completed their rehabilitation, and returned to the community. They were assessed at 1, 4 and 12 months post-discharge to capture possible changes in patterns of social support and coping. Covariance structure modelling indicated a single-factor construct based on three measured subscales for social support (instrumental/informational/emotional), and for coping (problem-oriented/perception-oriented/emotion-oriented). While the factor structure of coping was invariant over time, the structure of social support changed from a high concentration of informational support at one month to a higher saturation of emotional support at 4 and 12 months, potentially reflecting changes in the salience of different components of the network. The perceived availability of social support was seen to have direct effects on future coping. At one month, social support had a direct positive effect on coping at four months. However, at four months social support had a negative effect on coping at 12 months, which may reflect a change in the structure of the social support construct itself. That is, as the factor structure of social support varied with time, coping may also have been influenced by differing perception of one's needs and circumstances. Thus, the study provides evidence for the dynamic effects of social support on coping, depending on one's stage in the process of long-term adjustment. The findings underscore the interplay between social support and coping, and the need for future research and practical applications to recognize temporal effects on the relationships between these two complex constructs.

Social support in self-help groups, as experienced by persons having coronary heart disease and their next of kin

Self-help groups related to coronary heart disease constitute a network for support in which the members of the group have the opportunity both to receive and provide social support. The purpose of this study was to reach in-depth information from group members about lived experience of social support in a self-help group. A qualitative research method influenced by phenomenology was used and the findings showed a pattern of social support that can be described as a sharing of experience among confident equals, thanks to mutual feelings of caring and belonging, which in turn strengthens confidence. The group members' experience of social support show that the group constitutes a cornerstone in a network for support and contributes to well-being, coping ability and a build up of confidence at the prospect of a more promising future.

Social Inequalities and Health

Social Inequalities and Health

Self-reported social networks and interpersonal support 2 years after severe traumatic brain injury.

Fifty-four patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) consecutively admitted to a rehabilitation hospital were examined 2 years post-injury. Social interaction and support, subjective complaints, and functional status were assessed. A large variability in social interaction and support patterns was found. Most patients had more interaction and received more support from family members than from friends and neighbours. Thirty-one patients (57.4%) reported that their social networks had markedly declined subsequent to injury. Relatively short duration of coma (< 1 week) and severe sequelae in terms of low functional status and poor emotional adjustment at follow-up, especially in terms of deficits in initiating behaviour, were found to be related to little interaction and support. The importance of both provider and patient initiative in order to establish and preserve a social support network is suggested, and clinical implications briefly discussed.