CHAPTER 9 SOCIAL SUPPORT: THE MANY FACES OF HELPFUL SOCIAL INTERACTIONS RALF SCHWARZER and ANJA LEPPIN Freie Universit5t Berlin, Institut fiir Psychologie, FB 12 WE 07, Habekhwerdter Allee 45, D-1000 Berlin 33, Federal Republic of Germany Abstract Broadly defined, social support is regarded as resources provided by others. Its importance has been widely demonstrated in many fields of study. However, unclear definitions and short- comings in theory and measurement have :esulted in a number of inconsistencies limiting the generalizations of empirica; findings. The present articte reviews some of the critical issues and tries to organize this domain in terms of some basic dimensions of social support. Most authors agree upon the usefulness of distinctions such as received vs. perceived support, structural vs. functional support, and different types and sources of support. Their relative merits as docu- mented in the recent literature are discussed here. The paper concludes with some thoughts about social support and educational research. Introduction Social support has been conceived of and measured in a variety of ways within a number of theoretical and empirical frameworks. The interest shared by all those hundreds of studies which have been conducted during the last decade is that they have all been deal- ing with the beneficial effects social contact is supposed to have on mental and physical well-being. Apart from that, the research domain can be characterized as one of consid- erable heterogeneity. Many researchers have “defined” the construct simply in operational terms, often in an ad hoc way fitting the needs 1-6their respective studies, but even those efforts that have been made to define the concept theoretically are only partly compatible (Cassel, 19’74;Caplan, 1974; Cobb, 1976; Gottlieb, 1983; House, 1981; Kahn & Antonucci, 1980; Shumaker & Brownell, 1984). Cohen and Syme (1985), in a review on social support and health, deliberately choose a broad definition to encompass many approaches: “Social support is the resources provided by others” (p. 4). While this conceptualization might cause little antagonism, in its very broadness it also reflects the deficits of the research domain. Social support has in fact become an “omnibus term” referring to all kinds of different aspects of social relationships, As a research concept it might, thus, be of little use (see Barrera, 1986; House & Kahn, 1985), so that a disentangiement of different dimensions and aspects seems necessary. Recent publications have in fact shown a trend away from the global issue of whether social support in general affects well-being towards asking more precise questions and developing more concrete models of how different kinds of support affect specific kinds 333