Providing partner support in good times and bad: Providers’ outcomes

Abstract

Past work has often examined outcomes associated with receiving support for the support recipient, but less work has focused on the impact that providing support has on the support provider. In this study, we examined the impact of providing responsive support (i.e. support that communicates understanding, validation, and caring) on the support provider. In a 10-day daily experience study, 78 romantic partners (39 couples) reported once a day on their responses to their partners’ positive and negative event disclosures. Specifically, participants reported on whether their partner talked about an event and the intended responsiveness of their response, and completed several daily personal and relationship well-being measures (relationship satisfaction, life satisfaction, vitality, and anxiety). Analyses revealed that providing responsive support for positive event disclosures was associated with benefits for the support provider, including higher daily relationship and life satisfaction, and vitality. In contrast, providing responsive support for negative event disclosures was associated with lower levels of daily well-being (less relationship satisfaction, greater anxiety). However, being someone who typically provides responsive support for negative events was still optimal over the course of the study. Results are discussed in terms of the immediate and longer-term differences between being responsive to positive event disclosures (i.e. capitalization) and negative event disclosures (i.e. traditional social support).

Keywords:

• social support
• capitalization
• support provision
• support provider
• well-being
• relationship satisfaction

Notes

1. We also ran these correlations separately for men and women. For men, the patterns for positive events were all the same although the correlation with satisfaction with life was no longer significant (p = .135) and the relationship with subjective vitality became significant (p = .021). For women, the patterns for positive events were also similar although the association between the number of positive events shared and satisfaction with life became marginal (p = .072) and the association with subjective vitality was no longer significant (p = .354). For both men and women, the number of negative events disclosed was not significantly related to any outcomes of interest.

2. Although not a primary interest of the study, we also examined potential gender differences in the model by looking at main effects of gender as well as the role gender may play in moderating the impact of sharing on daily outcomes. In terms of gender, women were found to report lower levels of subjective vitality across the models. In terms of positive event disclosure models, women showed greater associations of positive event disclosures with satisfaction with life (p = .044). In addition, in terms of negative event disclosure models, inclusion of gender in the model resulted in a significant effect of negative event disclosure on relationship satisfaction (p = .007), with women showing reduced benefits of the disclosure compared to men (p = .035). No other significant effects of gender were seen throughout the models.

3. We again explored gender differences in these models on an exploratory basis. In terms of negative event models, we found that women showed less of a decline in relationship satisfaction (p = .014) and less of a decline in satisfaction with life (p = .023) as a function of providing more responsive support than men (p = .014), but showed greater declines in subjective vitality as a function of providing more responsive negative event support (p = .018). Gender had no impact on the associated outcomes of providing responsive positive event support.

4. We also ran these analyses looking at grand-mean centered responsiveness (in other words, the daily level of responsiveness compared to the average responsiveness across the sample) while simultaneously controlling for the individual’s average responsiveness across the diary period. These analyses provided similar results for the association between daily responsiveness and our outcomes of interest.