| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Nonetheless, most research that followed did not heed this directive. Many studies continued to use rudimentary measures of social support, treating social support and social networks as interchangeable concepts (House et al., 1982; Schoenbach et al., 1986). Even though an individual needs to be tied to others in a social network to have a potential source of social support, social ties do not necessarily provide support or the specific type of support an individual needs. Stokes and Wilson (1984) demonstrate that network size cannot predict the amount of support received (see also Seeman & Berkman, 1988) and Hirsch (1980) reports that mothers returning to college did not get the support they needed from their close-knit family and friends. Clearly, confounding social networks and social support is both theoretically and methodologically inaccurate.
An additional limitation in this area of research is the use of support measures that cannot accurately capture the variability found in the direct effects by gender, race, and age. Marriage has been shown to lead to significant reductions in mortality for men but not women (Berkman & Breslow, 1983), whereas women are found to exchange emotional support more often than men (Liebler & Sandefur, 2002). African Americans are found to rely more heavily on friends and relatives for obtaining social support than on a spouse (Berkman & Breslow 1983), and African American women report more support from family members during pregnancy than do white women (Sagrestano, Feldman, Rini, Woo, & Dunkel-Schetter, 1999). The elderly need more social support for material and emotional needs because their capacities may be diminished (Cohen et al., 1987). Regardless of such findings, the measurement of social support in this area of study does not address these considerations.