Measuring the Functional Components of Social Support

Abstract

In the last several years, we have been interested in the role social supports play in protecting people from the pathogenic effects of stress. By social supports, we scan the resources that are provided by other persons (cf. Cohen & Syme, 1985). Although others have investigated and in some cases found evidence for a “buffering” hypothesis—that social support protects persons from the pathogenic effects of stress but is relatively unimportant for unexposed individuals, there are difficulties in interpreting this literature. First, there are almost as many measures of social suppport as there are studies. Hence it is difficult to compare studies and to determine why support operates as a stress buffer in some cases, but not in others. Second, in the vast majority of work, support measures are used without regard to their psychometric properties or their appropriateness for the question under study. For example, studies using measures assessing the structure of social networks (e.g, how many friends do you have?) are seldom distinguished from those addressing the functions that networks might serve (e.g., do you have someone you can talk to about personal problems?). In fact, in many cases, structural and functional items are thrown together into single support indices resulting in scores that have little conceptual meaning.

Research by the authors reported in third chapter was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BNS 7923453) and the National Heart, Lung & Institute (HL 29547). The authors are indebted to Edward Lichtenstein and Karen McIntrye for their collaboration on the smoking cessation project, to Michael Scheier, Chuck Carver, Larry Cohen, Donald Graham, Ben Cottlieb, Irvin Sandler and Maryann Jacobi for allowing us to report data fron their studies, and to Dru Sherrod for his comments on an earlier draft.