Social Support

Social support is embedded in our ties to the people around us, whether the ties are informal or formal. There are different types of social support and due to this, one can make the argument that social support affects and contribute to health. In order to analysis the connection between social support and health in a social network, it’s important to look at the structure and function of social support in order to see the connection to behaviors that contribute to health status. Social support is rooted into our social networks that it plays an important role in how integrated we are to our society and how that plays a role in the health behaviors we choose to exercise.
Scholars, who have done researches and studies on this topic,

have argued that within social support there are two major components: the structural base and the functional elements. The structural base is how involved an individual is at the different layers. In an ego network, there are multiple layers of relationship and involvement, starting with the community as being the outer layer and intimate relationships being the inner layer (Lin et. al). One study had hypothesized that being a part of the outer layer improves the chances of a better position within the inner layers (Lin et. al). This means that by being involved in the community network, in some way, it will increase the chances to get a better position in more personal networks. The relationships in the middle layer, which is often considered the social network layer, entail more than just participation between an ego and alters around it. Instead, both ego and alter must invest their time in maintaining the relationship between the two through frequent interactions and commitments (Lin et. al). This leads to creating a bonding relationship among the social network of friends and colleagues that provide opportunities to create binding relationships, which as intimate relationships. When we look at this, we can think about how networks grow by adding new people to the network. If a person is involved in the community, they have a high chance of meeting new people because of how large a community is. From the large size of people to get to know, they have a greater chance of meeting people who share common interests, leading to bonding relationships within people in the community. Once those bonding relationships increase in numbers and the relationships continue to grow and become stronger ties, bonding relationships become binding ties. This process has the potential to stem from simply being involved and participating in the community.
With the structural base intact, there becomes a foundation of support for the functional elements of social support. The functional elements have three dimension of depth of communication and transactions that it provides: objective versus subjective, tangible, and psychological. The functional elements include “instrumental, expressive, appraisal, and information support” (Lin et. al). Among those elements of support, there are functional core supports that each have their own dimension and comparison value for certain situations: perceived versus actual support, instrumental versus emotional (expressive) support, and routine versus emotional crisis support. Perceived support is the perception of making availability for support when it is necessarily needed and the evaluation of the appropriateness and quality of the support. Actual support is the “nature and frequency of specific support transactions” (Lin et. al). I interpreted this type of support as having certain support responses to certain situations in need of support. Findings from studies and research have concluded that perceived support is better at resisting distress (Lin et. al). This means that there are different levels of supports and appropriateness for different situations, but the most importance different is that there is a difference in the quality of the support needed.
In addition to perceived and actual support, there are instrumental-emotional support and routine-emotional crisis that are often at odds with each other. Instrumental support is often referred to “tangible assistance” (Lin et. al). This includes actions with taking care of children or the household chores or lending money (Berkman and Glass). This type of support is focused on being involved in some way with dealing with other sources of stress. Emotional support is the use of social relationships to share emotions with, regardless of what kind of emotions they are sharing. Most of the common sentiments that are shared among social networks are frustration, understanding, sharing of thoughts and values, and building self-worth (Lin et. al). These expressive interactions with the social network of friends and colleagues contribute to the bonding process of relationships because they can rely on one another for emotional support and it becomes a source of emotional outlet. When people are in an emotionally supportive relationship, they share a communication that shows they care, love, and value the person as well as belonging to a “network of mutual obligation” (Hinson Langford et. al). The last dimension of the functional elements is routine versus emotional crisis support. Routine support is supportive actions that are on a day-to-day basis, such as grocery shopping and childcare (Lin et. al). Emotional crisis support is support received when an ego encounter a crisis event in their lives, such as a divorce or accident (Lin et. al). These different types of support are all important and thus, the more embeddedness there is in the structure of the ego-centric network, the wide variety of support functions there will be for the ego people. By looking at the structure of an individual’s network, we can assume and determine what types of functional support that person is receiving.
In addition to the structural and functional aspect of social support, there is the social exchange theory that plays a role in influencing how social support helps or influences a decline of health status. In each network, there tends to be a mutual give and take between two alters (Hinson Langford et. al). This means that the two individual exchange some type of resources and in this case, they are exchanging support to one another, although at the moment, it tends to be one-sided. The resource that is passed between the two individual does not necessarily mean that it has to be the same resource when it goes back and forth between the two. For example, if a husband gets sick, the wife might be taking care of him, providing instrumental support. After he gets better, he goes back to work and brings back a paycheck that helps with financing the family’s needs. This shows that support comes in different shapes and forms as resources. It could be intangible assistance, emotional help, or it could be tangible assistance, financial aid (Hinson Langford et. al). Another concept to keep in mind is that not all types of supports and resources come from all ties, each tie has their own specific level of support and resources that it provides (Berkman and Glass).
After understanding the definition and fundamentals of social support, we can start to analyze the connection between social support and health. Studies have been done to look at physical health and mental health. There has been a lesser conclusive association between social support and physical health while there are more consistent data on social support and mental health (Seeman). This makes sense because most of the different types of support are to ease the stress level of the ego and not address physical health. We know there is a correlation between stress and mental health and thus, stress-managing support eases the potential for mental health problems. If we just look at the size of the ego’s network, one can argue that the larger the network with strong ties, the less lonely the ego feel. This lead to the concept of social integration and how it plays a role in health concerns. Durkheim had theorized that there are four distinct categories of societal influence that contribute to suicide (Knoke). His theory had two big components: integration and regulation. He argued that a society needs to provide a balance of both to set a guidance into the society they live in. Within a network, we can assume and determine how much integration and regulation an ego have by looking at the attributes of the alters that are tied to the ego. Studies on social integrations had been mainly studied from an epidemiological standpoint. Through this approach, research has been done on the “health effects of social ties or social network” (Seeman). One way of using the network is to look at the attributes of the alters because we can see what kind of relationship the two individual have and the exchange relationship between them. If most of the alters are just families and close friends, they aren’t really integrated and involved with the society around them. From the studies that have been done to see the association between high social integration and low mortality, there is has been strong evidence that “social integration has a positive influence on mental health” (Seeman). Thus, having different layers of a network helps at least one aspect of health.
By conducting these studies from an epidemiological standpoint, links between supportive and social resources and the disease risk can be determined.

Scholars agree that social support is one large component from the social network that influences both physical and mental health, but they argued that “it is not the only critical pathway” (Berkman and Glass). Beyond social support, they look into the behavior level of a social network that includes four smaller pathway: “provision of social support, social influences, social engagement and attachment, and access to resources and material good” (Berkman and Glass). Social support becomes a smaller part of their argument on how social networks affect health. There are other factors that contribute to behaviors that influences health results and social support become one of the factors. Through the epidemiological studies, they focus on “health-damaging behaviors such as tobacco consumption,” “health-promoting behavior such as appropriate health service,” “medical adherence, and exercise,” and “exposure to infectious disease agents” (Berkman and Glass). These focuses are on how the behaviors are reproduced in order to help determine better ways to address health issues that are a result of the consequences of social interactions between people. Behaviors are often taught and reinforced and then reproduced when it becomes a norm for the

clique.
Overall, by understanding the structure and function of social support, we can use a social network to link the association between social effects and health issues by looking at how social support and social influences play an active role in health behaviors. The structure of social support mapped out the different layers of engagement that helped with understanding how integrated an individual is in their society. The functional elements show the different types of social supports that can lead to different social influences and interactions between people. Both shows how much access they have to resources and material goods by showing how large their network is and what types of support they received and the resources they received along with that support. Social support and health have an association that is rooted in our everyday interactions that we often don’t feel the power of this tie.