Research Seminar with Biru Zhou: Ask and you shall receive - Cultural and gender variations in social support processes
As an essential part of close relationships, social support is a dynamic interactive process. Social support plays an important role in individual's well鈥恇eing and the development of intimate relationships. Our study used dyadic analysis to incorporate cultural and gender influences into our understanding of social support seeking and provision within same鈥恠ex friendships. Guided by Robert A. Hinde鈥檚 framework on multiple levels of social complexity, our goal in this study was to identify not only intrapersonal but also interpersonal effects on enacted social support seeking and provision behaviours, taking friendship qualities, cultural (Euro-Canadian vs. Chinese) and gender variations into consideration. Supportive versus negative friendship qualities were used to predict different support鈥恠eeking and support鈥恜rovision behaviours during a quasi-experimental task. Contrary to previous studies on social support, there was no evidence of cultural group differences on support鈥恠eeking or provision behaviours among same鈥恠ex friends after accounting for friendship qualities in the dyads. Self鈥恟eported friendship qualities influence support鈥恠eeking and provision behaviours intrapersonally and interpersonally. By bridging the theoretical model of multiple levels of social complexity and the analytical model of Actor-Partner Interdependence Model together, our research provided a more comprehensive understanding of cultural and gender variations on enacted social support processes among same鈥恠ex friendship dyads.
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