Social Support Flashcards
What is social support?
The amount of help time and resources offered an individual by others in order to help them cope with stress. Family, friends, colleagues, teachers and even Doctors or therapists can all be a source of social support when dealing with stressful situations.
What are the types of social support and who identified them?
Stroebe(2000)
Appraisal support Emotional support Esteem support Instrumental support Informational support
What is appraisal support?
Help to understand the stressful situation and the effect it is having on the individual. Sometimes people can benefit from an objective view of the situation from someone else
What is emotional support?
When others can provide comfort for the stressed individual by offering sympathy or care in some way. This can help them to feel better while they cope with the stress.
What is esteem support?
Support in making the person feel valued and capable while they cope with a stressful situation. If others can big them up by demonstrating all the positive things they are doing, it may help them to feel more in control and actually make coping seem easier.
What is instrumental support?
Providing tangible help to cope with the stressor. This could be indirect, such as helping out with housework while a person adapts to and copes with a bereavement to give them more space and time to grieve. Or it could be direct such as lending money to help a person financially following loss of employment.
What is informational support?
Support by providing information and ideas on how the person could coupe with stress, or simply comment on how they think the person is coping to help them
reflect on the situation
How can you improve social support?
Support groups
Social media
Joining clubs or starting hobbies
What is the key study within social support?
Bolger and Amstel (2007)
What was Bolger and Amarel’s aim?
To investigate whether visible or invisible social support is more effective in helping people cope with stress.
What was Bolger and Amarel’s procedure?
A group of 257 female participants were made to give a public speech as a stressor. Each was paired with a female researcher who provided either visible support (including advice on what to do) or invisible support (including an audible discussion with another researcher about good tips on public speaking). Following the speech the participants reported back on their stress levels
What were Bolger and Amarel’s results?
Visible support seemed to increase emotional reactions to stress, while invisible support reduced stress levels.
What was Bolger and Amarel’s conclusion?
It is possible that visible stress may make people feel judged as unable to cope
finish the evaluation: understanding different types of social support is useful as some may be more useful in certain situations than others.
For example, the type of support needed to deal with work stress is very difficult to the type of support needed to deal with bereavement.
finish the evaluation: the effects on social support are difficult to measure as it is unclear what helps to reduce stress.
It could simply by an increase in self esteem from feeling valued that makes people feel better, rather than an actual decrease in stress
