Alan Vaux

Modes of social support: The social support behaviors (SS-B) scale

ConclusionThe SS-B appears to be a promising measure of five modes of available supportive behavior: emotional support, socializing, practical assistance, financial assistance, and advice/guidance. The measure was designed to assess supportive behavior available from family and from friends. For specific purposes the measure might be modified to tap enacted supportive behavior, as was done in Study 4, or might focus on different sources (cf. Tardy, 1985). Further evidence of the divergence of mode-specific scales would be valuable and might be demonstrated by comparing samples with mode-specific deficits, by comparing support received for different problem types (in a more sophisticated fashion than was done here), and by showing differentiated associations between modes of support and various outcome variables. The reliable and valid assessment of specific modes of supportive behavior is an important agenda item in social support research: Such a measure would allow more elaborate theories to be tested, and will undoubtedly prove essential in a complete understanding of social support processes.

Social Support Resources Variation Across Sex and Sex Role

Although considerable research effort has been spent in documenting the beneficial effects of social support to individual well-being, little is known about the determinants of this resource or its distribution across sociocultural groups. The present study assessed the influence among college students of sex and sex role on three levels of social support resources: network characteristics, availability of several modes of support, and perceived supportiveness of family and friends. On a composite measure of overall support resources, females were superior to males, and feminine and androgynous individuals were superior to masculine and undifferentiated individuals. Only some specific social support variables differed across these groups specifically, network size and homogeneity, emotional support, and perceived supportiveness of family for sex role.

Orientation toward utilization of support resources

A construct in social support that has received relatively little attention is network orientation: the individuals willingness to utilize his or her social support resources. This construct and a 20-item self-report measure of it are presented. Data from five samples, including four samples of somewhat heterogeneous students and one sample of community adults, were used to assess the reliability and validity of the instrument. The instrument showed good internal consistency and showed excellent stability in the community sample, but not in the student samples. The measure showed good validity with respect to a range of social support criterion measures, somewhat good validity with respect to personal characteristics, and somewhat poor validity with respect to coping and self-disclosure criteria. It was proposed that individuals who have social support resources but do not use them may be an important focus for interventions.

An Ecological Approach to Understanding and Facilitating Social Support

Social support is best viewed as a complex process unfolding in an ecological context. This process involves transactions between people and their social networks, including the active development and maintenance of support network resources, the management of support incidents to elicit appropriate supportive behavior from the network and the synthesis of information to yield support appraisals. The process is shaped by features of both the person and the social ecology. This ecological model of support allows a more complete understanding of support processes, including their relationship to stress and well-being. The model also serves as a framework for intervention, highlighting targets and strategies for programs designed to facilitate social support. Options briefly discussed include improving utilization of resources, developing and maintaining resources, managing support incidents and enhancing support appraisals.

Stressful life change and delinquent behavior

The study examined life change in relation to self-reported involvement in five specific types of crime and delinquency among members of a noninstitutionalized sample. A group of 531 in-school youths, age 14 to 19, were asked to report how frequently in the 6 months since school started they had performed each of 26 criminal or delinquent acts and how many of 20 potentially stressful life events they had experienced in the year preceding the start of school. Regression analyses showed that, for both males and females, life change added significantly to age and SES in predicting violence, theft, drug use, property damage, and a group of relatively nonserious delinquent acts. On the basis of social psychological theory and research, possible explanatory mechanisms in the link between life stress and specific forms of crime and delinquency are discussed as part of a proposed life stress-deviance model.

Adolescents who work: Effects of part-time employment on family and peer relations.

Research on adolescents has ignored a setting in which significant numbers of young people spend significant amounts of time: the workplace. The increasing participation of high school students in the part-time labor force raises a number of questions about the impact of such employment on family and peer relations. Questionnaire data from a descriptive study of 531 tenth- and eleventh- graders indicate that (a) working attenuates time spent with family, but not with peers; (b) girls, but not boys, may enter the work force in part as a result of weaker emotional ties to their parents; (c) working has negligible impact on the quality of family and peer relationships; (d) despite substantial incomes, workers do not have complete autonomy over their expenditures, nor do working and money-making lead to increased autonomy in other areas; and (e) the workplace is not a source of close personal relationships with others. Taken together, these findings suggest that working does not have a substantial immediate impact on the adolescents relations with others. Possible long-range effects are briefly noted.

Social support appraisals and network resources

The conceptual and empirical distinction of social support networks and subjective appraisals of support is increasingly evident in the social support literature. Support appraisals appear especially important in promoting well-being and may serve as the focus of preventive interventions. Yet little is known about the support network resources that promote positive appraisals of support. One hundred thirty-eight community residents participated in a telephone interview, yielding extensive data on the size, composition, and relationship characteristics of networks providing five kinds of support, satisfaction with support, and perceptions of support from family, friends, and others. Regression and canonical correlation analyses yielded complex findings. Support perceptions, and to a much lesser extent satisfaction, were associated with a variety of resource variables, most prominently the size of emotional and socializing networks, the reciprocity and complexity of network relationships, and the proportion of close friends and family members in the network. The implications of the findings for support-based interventions are briefly discussed.

Social and Emotional Loneliness The Role of Social and Personal Characteristics

One hundred forty college students provided data on social and emotional loneliness, social provisions, social support appraisals, features of socializing and emotional support networks, and personal characteristics thought to inhibit social interaction or the development of relationships. Limited evidence was obtained for the view that social and emotional loneliness are distinct experiences with different social and personal antecedents. Both social and emotional loneliness were inversely associated with provisions of social relationships, with appraisals of support, and with both quantitative features (size, frequency) and qualitative features (closeness, reciprocity, complexity) of social support networks. Social and emotional loneliness also were associated inversely with personal characteristics, particularly discomfort in social situations, self-esteem, and a negative orientation toward support networks.

Early Work Experience Effects on Adolescent Occupational Socialization

One of the arguments frequently offered for the more deliberate and extensive involvement of adolescents in the workplace is that such experience may have a significant impact on a youngster’s occupational development. Indeed, the notion that a young person’s attitudes toward working, occupational interests and values, work habits, and knowledge about the world of work are all shaped by early work experience has pervaded, often implicitly, but occasionally explicitly, each of several &dquo;blue-ribbon&dquo; commission reports on

Dimensions Relating Holland's Vocational Personality Typology and the Five-Factor Model.

This study examined the correspondence between two models of personality structure, both of which purport to be comprehensive: Hollands (1992) vocational personality typology and the five-factor model. In this research, 102 female and 91 male college students completed the Self-Directed Search (SDS; Holland, 1985a) and the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI; Costa & McCrae, 1985). Results of canonical analyses revealed two dimensions to which SDS and NEO-PI variable sets were related for both females and males; however, the nature of the dimension pairs differed by gender. For females, significant overlap between SDS and NEO-PI domains was represented by a dimension characterized by a Nonpersonal Orientation at one pole and an Interpersonal Orientation at the other pole, and a Closedness-Openness dimension. For males, overlap between the two domains was explained by Closedness-Openness and Introversion-Extraversion dimensions. Results generally were consistent with theoretical definitions of the Big-Five personality dimensions, as well as the trait characterizations of the six Holland types. Results also revealed associations of Predigers (1982) Data/Ideas and Things/People with the Closedness-Openness and Nonpersonal-Interpersonal dimensions, respectively.