Event

Research Seminar with Biru Zhou: Ask and you shall receive - Cultural and gender variations in social support processes

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 12:00to13:00
Wilson Hall Wendy Patrick room (room 118), 3506 rue University, Montreal, QC, H3A 2A7, CA
Price: 
Free

As an essential part of close relationships, social support is a dynamic interactive process. Social support plays an important role in individual's well‐being 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‐sex friendships. Guided by Robert A. Hinde’s 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‐seeking and support‐provision behaviours during a quasi-experimental task. Contrary to previous studies on social support, there was no evidence of cultural group differences on support‐seeking or provision behaviours among same‐sex friends after accounting for friendship qualities in the dyads. Self‐reported friendship qualities influence support‐seeking 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‐sex friendship dyads.

Bring your lunch. Cookies & coffee will be served.

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