The Role of Social Support in Coping with Stress (AQA A Level Psychology): Revision Note

Instrumental, emotional & esteem support

• Schaefer et al. (1981) identified at least three distinct forms of social support, which may help individuals cope with stress by acting as a defence against stressors

• The three forms of social support are as follows:

  • Instrumental support – practical and tangible support, such as giving someone a lift to hospital, lending money, or providing information (telling someone what you know about stress)

  • Emotional support – expressions of warmth, concern, affection, empathy and love, summed up in what we mean when we say things like 'I really feel for you', which is not intended to offer any kind of practical help but rather to make the stressed person feel better

  • Esteem support – This occurs when friends and family show that they have high esteem for the individual, which strengthens their feelings of self-worth and helps them feel able to cope with the stress

• Social networks vary in size and in the strength of the support they offer

  • Someone with a relatively small support network can get a great deal of support from few people, while someone with a large and widespread network may not get much support from it

• Social support does not always have to be in person, as emotional and esteem support can be provided every minute of every day over social networks such as Facebook and X, and a cheque sent with a card or letter through the post offers instrumental support without anyone meeting face-to-face

Research which investigates the role of social support in coping with stress

• Orth-Gomer et al. (1993) found that in a sample of 700 middle-aged Swedish men, smoking and lack of social support were the two leading risk factors for coronary heart disease

• Fawzy et al. (1993) randomly allocated patients with malignant melanoma to a support group for six weeks, one session a week, which gave them an opportunity to express their feelings (emotional support) and to get information and advice about their illness (instrumental support)

  • Six years later, the support group patients had better NK cell functioning and were more likely to be alive and free of cancer than patients in a control group

• Cohen et al. (2015) telephoned 404 healthy adult participants every evening for 14 consecutive days to measure the number of hugs they received each day, and had them complete a questionnaire assessing perceived social support and stress in terms of daily interpersonal conflicts

  • Participants were then exposed to a common cold virus and monitored for signs of illness

  • Participants who experienced the most interpersonal conflict were most likely to become ill, but those who perceived they had greater social support had a significantly reduced risk of illness, with hugs accounting for around a third of the protective effect

    • This suggests that perceived social support acts as a buffer against stress, and that hugs are a behavioural sign of actual emotional support

Evaluation of the role of social support in coping with stress

Strengths

• Social support can be flexible, with different types of social support being more helpful in different situations, such as emotional support being more helpful when an individual is faced with the stress caused by the breakdown of a relationship

• Luckow et al. (1998) reviewed 26 studies investigating gender differences in social support and found that women used social support as a means of coping with stress more than men did, with 25 of the studies showing no difference in men's use of it

  • This suggests the size of network is not the crucial factor influencing the effectiveness of social support, as in times of stress virtually every measure one came across found women are more likely to seek out and use social support as well as provide it

Limitations

• Social support is not universally beneficial and can backfire, as what matters is who provides the support and what type they give

  • Emotional support is usually welcomed from friends and relatives, but instrumental support in the form of information is more valued when it comes from medical professionals

  • Also, there are times when emotional support from a close relative or friend is not helpful, e.g., if they insist on coming with us to a hospital appointment we might end up feeling more anxious than if we went alone

  • This suggests support may be more beneficial when it is sought by the recipient than when it is imposed by the supporter

• It is difficult to isolate and test separate types of social support, making it difficult to assess which are most influential in helping individuals cope with stress

Issues & Debates

• Taylor et al. (2004) compared Americans of European and Asian origins, and found that Asian-Americans were much less likely to seek and use social support networks in times of stress, as they were concerned not to disrupt the harmony of their communities by bringing their own problems to everybody's attention

  • This challenges the assumption that social support is universally beneficial, as its effectiveness appears to be influenced by cultural factors

• Research typically uses large-scale, quantitative (nomothetic) methods to study social support

  • A fuller understanding of stress management could be achieved by combining this with idiographic approaches that explore individual differences in how support is experienced