Introduction

Social support has been described as a meta-construct consisting of three subsidiary constructs: social embeddedness, perceived support and enacted/received support (e.g. Barrera, 1986). My research is concerned with perceived support; defined as the subjective appraisal of being reliably connected to others (Barrera, 1986) and typically measured through the assessment of satisfaction with support and/or the availability of support (Sarason, Sarason, & Pierce, 1990) and received support; referred to as the actions performed when assistance is given to an individual (Barrera, 1986) and measured through the assessment of these specific supportive behaviours (Haber, Cohen, Lucas, & Baltes, 2007).

Perceived support has been consistently linked to health outcomes; people who are more socially integrated tend to be healthier, both physically and mentally, than those who are more socially isolated (Barrera, 1986; House, Landis & Umberson, 1988; Uchino, 2009). The most dominant theory that has tried to account for this relationship is stress buffering theory, an extension of Lazarus' (1966) general stress and coping theory developed by a number of scholars including Barrera (1986), Thoits (1986) and Cohen & Wills (1985). This theory suggests that the ability to cope with stressful events is facilitated by support from others and relies on the relationship between received and perceived support being strong; the more support received, the more supported an individual feels, the more able they are to cope. However, the relationship between received and perceived support has been found to be consistently weak, for example, a meta-analysis of 23 studies found the average correlation between perceived and received support to be r = .35, p<.001 (Haber et al., 2007). Furthermore, interventions that aim to improve health by increasing received support have been developed based on stress buffering theory but have provided mixed results (Barrera, Glasgow, McKay, Boles & Feil, 2002).

My Research

The focus of my current research is on the relationship between perceived and received support and their relationship to mental and physical health. Despite the large amount of research that has been carried out on these topics there has been very little investigation of the mechanisms that underlie judgements of support although there have been many calls for such studies (Thoits, 2011). In applying the Decision by Sampling (DbS: Stewart, Chater & Brown, 2006) model (see my research page for more information) to social support judgements I hope to:

• Show the mechanisms that underlie judgements of perceived support
• Explain why there is a weak correlation between received and perceived support
• Explain why interventions increasing support in an attempt to boost health outcomes have had mixed findings
• Advance stress buffering theory

The Relationship Between Received and Perceived Support

DbS assumes that judgements and choices are context-dependent; an item that is being judged is compared to a mental sample of other, similar items leading to a judgement in terms of the item’s relative ranked position within the sample. This sample may be constructed of items from memory and/or items in the immediate context. In the case of perceived support, when an individual is judging their satisfaction with support or the availability of support they will compare their own support provision to that of other people, perhaps friends or family or neighbours.

In its pure form, this approach suggests that the absolute magnitude of the target item may have no bearing on the judgement made that is instead entirely relative. Therefore, when judging for example, satisfaction with support, it is not the actual amount of support received that determines the judgement but where this amount ranks in comparison to the support received by other people. This could explain why there is such a weak correlation between received and perceived support.

The Relationship Between Received and Perceived Support and Health

The DbS model can also account for the mixed findings on whether or not increasing support can alter support perceptions and improve health. As previously explained, when an individual is judging, for example, how available support is to them they will do so by determining where their level of support availability ranks amongst other people they know. For example, they might think of three people who have more support available to them than they do and one person who has less support available. As they rank fourth out of five they may judge that they don’t have much support available.

When you increase the actual amount of support available the person may now have more available support than four out of the five people they brought to mind before and so they now rank second and will perceive that they have more support available. Note that their perceptions have changed not through the actual amount of support received but through their change in ranked position amongst their sample. If the amount of support received is not enough to change their ranked position then no change in support perceptions will be seen which could account for the studies which have found no change in support perceptions after social support was increased.

References

Barrera, M. Jr. (1986). Distinctions between social support concepts, measures and models. American Journal of Community Psychology, 14, 413–455. DOI: 10.1007/BF00922627

Barrera, M., Glasgow, R. E., McKay, H. G., Boles, S. M., & Feil, E. G. (2002). Do internet-based support interventions change perceptions of social support? An experimental trial of approaches for supporting diabetes self-management. American Journal of Community Psychology, 30, 637–654. DOI: 10.1023/A:1016369114780

Cohen, S., & Wills, T. A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98, 310–57. DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.98.2.310

Haber, M. G., Cohen, J. L., Lucas, T., & Baltes, B. B. (2007). The relationship between self-reported received and perceived social support: A meta-analytic review. American Journal of Community Psychology, 39, 133–144. DOI 10.1007/s10464-007-9100-9

House, J. S., Landis, K. R., & Umberson, D. (1988). Social relationships and health. Science, 241, 540–545. DOI: 10.1126/science.3399889

Lazarus, R. S., (1966). Psychological Stress and the Coping Process. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Sarason, B. R., Sarason, I. G., & Pierce, G. R. (1990). Traditional views of social support and their impact on assessment. In B. R. Sarason, I. G. Sarason, & G. R. Pierce (Eds.), Social support: An interactional view (pp. 9–25). New York, NY: Wiley.

Stewart, N., Chater, N., & Brown, G. D. A. (2006). Decision by sampling. Cognitive Psychology, 53, 1–26. DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2005.10.003

Thoits, P. A. (1986). Social support as coping assistance. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 54, 416–423. DOI: 10.1037/0022-006X.54.4.416

Thoits, P. A. (2011). Mechanisms linking social ties and support to physical and mental health. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 52, 145- 161. DOI: 10.1177/0022146510395592

Uchino, B. N. (2009). Understanding the links between social support and physical health: A life-span perspective with emphasis on the separability of perceived and received support. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4, 236-255. DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01122.x