Functional roles of social support within the stress and coping process: A theoretical and empirical overview

TLDR

The study investigates how social support functions in stress and coping by testing enabling, cultivation, and resource hypotheses across cardiac surgery, depression, and cancer contexts. Five studies—four longitudinal field studies and one experimental—measured self‑efficacy, coping, and partner support to examine how support facilitates coping and mediates outcomes. Results indicate that support effectiveness requires mediation by received support, that coping efforts predict others’ willingness to help, and that partner support is high but received support appears only later, reflecting time‑lagged resource transfer in asymmetric dyads.

Abstract

This article reports four longitudinal field studies and one experimental study designed to shed light on the functional roles of social support within the stress and coping context. First, the enabling hypothesis is examined that assumes a facilitating effect of support on self‐efficacy, which, in turn, promotes coping with the aftermath of cardiac surgery. Second, we discuss the support cultivation hypothesis that regards support as a mediator between self‐efficacy and various outcomes, such as depressive mood, as illustrated by a finding on the experience of macrosocial stress during the East German transition. Third, support is highlighted as a coping resource by specifying provided partner support as a predictor of patients' coping with cancer. It was found that the direct effect of provided support on coping needs to be mediated by received support in order to become effective. Fourth, coping efforts of a target person are found to be predictive of support intentions of a potential provider. The better a victim appears to cope with various stigmas, the higher the likelihood that a significant other is willing to help. Fifth, in a dyadic study on coping with cancer, partners were found to provide high levels of support to patients, but received support was affected only at later points in time. Time‐lagged partner effects may characterize resource transfer in asymmetric social situations in which only one element of the dyad is under severe stress.