More spousal support for men than for women: a comparison of sources and types of support

Sex Roles: A Journal of Research,  April, 2005  by Ralf Schwarzer,  Benicio Gutierrez-Dona

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The questions of who receives how much support and who benefits from it have been discussed for many years (e.g., Burleson, 2003; Wills & Fegan, 2001). In the present article, more refined distinctions are being made that might help to shed some light on this issue.

Social support may be regarded as resources provided by others, as coping assistance or as an exchange of resources. It also refers to the function and quality of social relationships, including perceived availability of help or support actually received (Thoits, 1986, 1991). The most common distinction is the one between perceived available support and support received. Perceived support may pertain to anticipating help in time of need, and received support to actual help provided within a given time period. The former is often prospective; the latter is always retrospective. This is an essential distinction because these two constructs need not necessarily have much in common. They can be closely related in some studies, but in others they may be unrelated, depending on wording and context (Newcomb, 1990). Expecting support in the future has been conceptualized as a stable personality trait (Sarason, Levine, Basham, & Sarason, 1983) that is intertwined with optimism, whereas support received in the past is based on actual circumstances. In this article, only received support is addressed, as reported by the employees.

Social Support Sources and Social Support Types

Several types of social support have been investigated, such as instrumental (e.g., assist with a problem), tangible (e.g., donate goods), informational (e.g., give advice), and emotional (e.g., give reassurance), among others (Burleson, 2003) There are a variety of support instruments, but only some of them refer to such conceptual distinctions. Most support instruments assess perceived available support in a global manner, whereas few make an attempt to assess received support in more detail (for an overview, see Cohen, Underwood, & Gottlieb, 2000).

A well-known self-report measure that takes the necessary differentiation of received support into account is the UCLA Social Support Inventory (UCLA-SSI) by Dunkel-Schetter, Feinstein, and Call (1986), which stimulated studies such as the present one. It distinguishes types of support, such as information, advice, aid, assistance, and emotional support, from sources of support, such as friends, family, spouses, or professional groups and organizations. In a study on the multidimensional nature of received social support in gay men, Schwarzer, Dunkel-Schetter, and Kemeny (1994) used the UCLA-SSI to examine to which degree friends, family, partners, and organizations provided assistance, gave advice, were reassuring, or listened empathically. The previous study (a predecessor of the present one) dealt with a longitudinal sample of 587 gay men in Los Angeles whose mean age was 36.8 years (SD = 6.8), with a range from 22 to 58 years. It turned out that sources were more important than support types, that is, there was less discriminant validity among types than among sources. In that particular sample of gay men, most of the support came from friends, followed by primary partners, and the least support came from their families. As that was a unique sample, it is of interest to learn what the pattern of received support looks like in different samples using the same instrument, which is one of the research questions of the present study.

Gender and Age Differences in Social Support Receipt

The need for support, its mobilization, perception, and receipt, differ systematically between populations. In addition to characteristics of life circumstances and stress situations, there are differences in gender, marital status, and age. Gender differences in social networks and social support have been discussed by various authors (cf. Glynn, Christenfeld, & Gerin, 1999). Throughout the life cycle, women generally have more close friends than men do (Antonucci & Akiyama, 1987). Commencing in childhood, girls tend to develop more intimate interpersonal relationships than boys do. Adult women still have a greater number of close relationships and also seemingly more extensive social networks than men do (Laireiter & Baumann, 1992). Generally, people maintain social connections with numerous others throughout life. However, during later adulthood, rates of social interaction begin to decline. Later-life relationships become fewer in number, but deeper in intensity and quality (Fredrickson & Carstensen, 1998). In addition, women provide more emotional support to both men and women, and they get more help in return (Klauer & Winkeler, 2002). Explanations for such discrepancies typically focus on gender differences in emotionality and emotional expressiveness (Burleson, 2003). Women emphasize intimacy and self-disclosure in their friendships, and they are generally more empathetic, expressive, and disclosing than men are. In short, women seem to devote more of themselves to their family and friends than men do. This may be why they often receive more support in return (Greenglass, 1982).