“We Know What They’re Going Through”: Social Support from Similar versus Significant Others

ABSTRACT

Stress research overlooks the possible importance of similar-other support – assistance from people experienced with an individual’s stressor. Theoretically, similar-other support should provide distinct types of aid and be more valued than significant-other support because it closely addresses challenges that a distressed person faces. Peer supporters (N = 84) were interviewed about help from significant- vs. similar-others from two standpoints, as support recipients when hospitalized for cardiac procedures, and as support providers to current heart patients. From both standpoints, similar-other assistance was described as different and more helpful. The relative contributions of these support sources to distressed individuals’ well-being deserve future examination.

KEYWORDS:

• Social support
• peer support
• similar-other support
• stress

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Whether conducted in-person or online, self-help/mutual support groups typically have an internal structure, an underlying ideology, dynamics which can complicate relationships among members (e.g., competition for status), and participants at different stages of an unfolding stress experience who are coping with varied degrees of success (Levy 2000; C. Taylor et al. 2007). Support group interactions thus are not fully comparable to naturally occurring contacts with experientially similar others in daily life.

2. Studies of similar-other assistance in face-to-face and online self-help groups typically examine only broad categories of support that are sought or provided by group members. Participants most often seek and/or are offered emotional and informational aid (e.g., Brown, Tang, and Hollman 2014; Coursaris and Liu 2009; Foster 2016; Meager, Gregor, and Stewart 1987; Yip 2019). Although some investigators have assessed very specific types of support exchanged in online groups (e.g., Coursaris and Liu 2009; Yip 2019), members’ perceptions of the helpfulness of these provisions are unknown.

3. Coding rules can be found online in Appendix A.

4. “Heart event” is a Mended Hearts term referring to having been diagnosed with a serious heart condition and having undergone a cardiac procedure. Many respondents have had multiple heart procedures; most joined Mended Hearts and became visitors after recovering from a major operation that they viewed as their second chance at life.

5. Codes for role modeling, hope, and a “possible self” repeatedly co-occurred in transcript passages so they were combined into a single category. In essence, similar others modeled a positive future self that respondents hoped to attain.

6. When identified as a patient/caregiver “visitor,” respondents are speaking from their perspective as a Mended Hearts peer supporter. When identified as a “former” patient/caregiver, respondents are discussing personal experiences of support they received during a past hospitalization. Chapters are identified only by Mended Hearts-designated regions, not by city nor chapter number. All respondents’ names are pseudonyms. “IWR” indicates the interviewer.

7. Many Mended Hearts chapters make or subsidize the production of pillows that are given to patients to protect their chest incisions from the effects of sneezing, coughing, and outside pressures.

8. Small (2017: 93) has argued that individuals with a troubling concern seek out consultants who can provide “cognitive empathy,” i.e., the ability to understand the individual’s predicament from the individual’s perspective – echoing the findings here.