The role of social support has probably been around since the dawn of human history, but it is only relatively recently that it has become the subject of scientific research. The reason for the interest in social support is based on observations that people who are surrounded by a large family, have many friends and belong to various organisations enjoy better health and can cope better with difficult and stressful situations.
We can distinguish between different types of social support. The most general categorisation has been made by Caplan (1984) describing the socioemotional function, which involves feelings of sympathy, understanding, acceptance shown by people important to us, and the instrumental function including advice, information, help with problems, lending money, etc. It is also worth quoting the more detailed division developed by Tardy (1985). He distinguishes between: emotional support - giving verbal and non-verbal messages such as 'we love you', 'we like you'; valuing support - making the individual realise that he or she is someone significant; instrumental support - providing concrete help, e.g. lending money; and informational support - providing information, advice that can help solve a problem.
The issue of social support has its place in the stream of research on the impact of psychosocial variables on health. Social support is considered as one of the factors that may contribute to the deterioration of health, or protect against the emergence of a condition.
It has been demonstrated in numerous studies that people with low social support are more likely to suffer from many physical and mental illnesses (Leavy, 1983; Berkman, 1984; after Pommersbach, 1988). However, there are difficulties in defining the relationship between support and illness and the underlying mechanism. The vast majority of claims concerning this issue have the status of hypotheses.
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The buffer hypothesis states that a high level of social support protects the individual from the adverse consequences of stress, whereas for those experiencing low levels of stress, the level of support is of little importance (Cobb, 1976). The implication is that social support acts as a buffer that only becomes necessary when experiencing stressful life events. The source of the buffer hypothesis is the observation that some people do not become ill despite experiencing severe stress, while in others relatively weak stress causes multiple disorders. An attempt to answer the question why this is the case is to suppose that the occurrence of problems, life difficulties in the presence of social support causes less distress and consequently a relatively low number of illness symptoms. The same event experienced without support would have a much worse effect.
