An interpersonal conceptualization and quantification of social support transactions

The guiding assumption of the present research was that social support behavior, like all interpersonal transactions, could be characterized as the exchange of love and status between participants in a dyadic interaction. Returning to Cobb's (1976) original definition of social support, and applying an explicit social exchange theory (Foa & Foa, 1974) within the framework of an interpersonal circumplex model, statements were generated that reflected different support styles thought to characterize different allocations of love and status between self and other. In a series of three studies, 1040 undergraduate students were asked to complete a self-report questionnaire indicating their likelihood of performing each support behavior. A circumplex structure was obtained that was both substantively and structurally auspicious, and that provided a taxonomic framework within which 12 extant social support subscales and 15 related personality characteristics were clarified, while also providing information regarding the construct validity of the circumplex framework itself. The Support Actions Scale Circumplex (SAS-C) appears to have the potential for clarifying the relations among existing social support scales and thereby integrating many of the diverse findings within the social support literature as well as for assessing a much broader range of social support behavior than has previously been measured, including both the potentially protective and deleterious effects of interpersonal transactions. Potential applications of this framework to a variety of related areas of research are also discussed.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat