Online Social Support: The Interplay of Social Networks and Compu ...

As has been stated, to overcome the shortcomings in the buffer and direct effect hypotheses, the research discussed thus far focused on the concept of social s upport and the relationships that affect it. Litwak et al. (1989), however, considered the limitations of the two hypotheses to be first-order theoretical constructs. The authors proposed the expanded organizational contingency theory, a second-order theoretical construct that considered the concept of social support and the relations that compose it simultaneously, rather than analyzing the diverse aspects of social support independently. They began by clarifying that the structure of groups varies, for example, primary groups or formal organizations, and the structure of tasks that provide support varies, for example, giving friendly advice or medical advice. Based on this premise, the expanded organizational contingency theory offered a theoretical framework that identified a group as capable of providing support when its structure matched the structure of a task that provided that support.

A task-specific model of detailed optimal matching was developed to apply the expanded organizational contingency theory to the evaluation of the effectiveness of a particular group in providing a specific form of social support (Messeri et al., 1993). The expanded organizational contingency theory offered the theoretical premise that the structure of both groups and tasks could vary; and the task-specific model provided a concrete classification of the two structures according to seven parallel dimensions:⁴ proximity, length of commitment, commonality of lifestyle, size, type of motivation, division of labor, and level of technical knowledge. For example, according to the dimension of proximity, a group would be identified as having close continuous contact or distant ad hoc contact, and a task would be identified as benefiting from close continuous contact or distant adhoc contact.