Elsevier

Social Science & Medicine

Volume 146, December 2015, Pages 129-136
Social Science & Medicine

Social support attenuates the harmful effects of stress in healthy adult women

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.10.038Get rights and content

Highlights

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    A group of healthy women completed a time-stamped daily diary regarding health.

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    Daily stress and daily physical symptoms were examined.

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    Stress increases symptoms but social support weakens this pattern even one day later.

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    Social support may act as a buffer that protects health.

Abstract

Objective

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that social support buffers the effects of perceived stress on physical symptoms in healthy women.

Methods

The study was conducted in the Southwest United States and data were collected from 2006 to 2010. Participants were 52 healthy adult women who completed a baseline questionnaire and a 21-day daily diary. Social support was assessed in the baseline questionnaire and perceived stress and physical symptoms were assessed in the daily diary. Multilevel analyses were used to predict both same day and next day physical symptoms from baseline social support and daily perceived stress.

Results

The hypotheses were supported when predicting both same and next day physical symptoms. For the same day, perceived stress and the social support × perceived stress interaction were both related to physical symptoms. For the next day, the social support × perceived stress interaction but not perceived stress was related to physical symptoms when controlling for previous day physical symptoms. The interactions were such that women higher in social support had smaller increases in same and next day physical symptoms on days of higher perceived stress than women lower in social support.

Conclusions

Social support may buffer the effects of daily perceived stress on physical symptoms in healthy women. Future research should investigate what aspects and in what contexts social support may reduce the effects of perceived stress on physical symptoms and examine how social support may affect the development of long-term health problems through increases in daily physical symptoms.

Section snippets

Participants

The participants were 52 healthy adult women who were recruited from the Albuquerque, New Mexico metropolitan area from 2006 through 2010. The study was conducted in compliance with the Institutional Review Board at the University of New Mexico and informed consent was obtained by research staff. The average age was 48.59 years (SD = 10.09) with a range from 30 to 67 years. Of the sample, 53% were currently married, 18% were never married, 14% were widowed, 3% were divorced, and 8% were living

Statistical analysis

Multilevel modeling (e.g., hierarchical linear modeling) was used to analyze the relationship between social support and daily measures. MLM is useful for data that have a nested hierarchical structure. Daily data take a hierarchical form, with up to 21 daily observations nested within each of the participants. We used the SPSS 21.0 mixed program for the multilevel analyses with model specifications based on the guidelines provided by Singer (1998).

The daily measure of physical symptoms was the

Results

Descriptive statistics appear in Table 1 and correlations of all variables that are entered into the models for this study appear in Table 2. Overall, social support was moderately negatively correlated with each participant's mean for daily perceived stress and for daily physical symptoms. The mean for daily perceived stress and daily physical symptoms were strongly correlated. Income, age, and education were controlled for in each statistical model, so they were included in the correlation

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to determine if social support may attenuate the relationship between daily perceived stress and physical symptoms in a sample of healthy adult woman. Our first hypothesis that greater perceptions of stress would be associated with greater reports of physical symptoms was supported for the same day but not the next day. Our second hypothesis that women higher in social support would have smaller increases in physical symptoms on or after days of higher perceived

Limitations

The study should be considered in the context of several limitations. This study utilized the daily diary technique for measuring stress and physical symptoms, but social support was only measured once at baseline. This means that we could not capture day to day fluctuations in perceived social support, although there is evidence that it may not fluctuate in the same way that perceived stress and physical symptoms do (e.g., Sarason et al., 1986). However, to whatever extent perceived social

Future directions

Studies that are conducted in the future should focus on individual differences in support preferences and how different forms of support are necessary in the context of different stressors. This may help to determine the extent to which social support may buffer the potential negative effects of stress on health. Because certain forms of support can be unhelpful (Bolger and Amarel, 2007), it may be important to be discerning regarding the type of social support provided to a distressed

Conclusions

This study brought the stress buffering hypothesis to bear on a healthy sample of women, and the findings suggested that this hypothesis is supported in this sample. The findings suggest that perceived support could be an important factor for women's health, and that there may be a need for variety in the types of support available in order to meet the needs elicited by a stressor. The results show that perceived social support can reduce the association between stress and same day and next day

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