Social support and compliance: A selective review and critique of treatment integrity and outcome measurement

This paper presents a selective review and critique of the literature on social support as a factor in the enhancement of patient compliance with medical regimens. The review highlights several studies that measure the correlation between social support and compliance. The manner in which studies operationalize social support is discussed. Several research recommendations suggest ways social support could be studied as a clear and strong independent variable, such as utilizing measures of compliance with the social support manipulation and considering several different variates of social support. Greater attention to methods for measuring compliance is also suggested.