Sibling Support During Post-Divorce Adjustment: An Idiographic Analysis of Support Forms, Functions, and Relationship Types

Abstract

This research examines social support from siblings following parental divorce, based on retrospective interviews and ratings obtained from adult children of divorced parents. Sibling relationships were diverse in the extent, form, and direction of support, as reflected in seven types of sibling support relationships (separates, pals, allies, opponents, parent, protector, encourager). Availability/companionship with siblings predicted improved adjustment to divorce, whereas multiple dimensions of maternal support predicted adjustment. Qualitative analyses suggested that the company of a sibling provided reassurance and promoted resilience, even in the absence of explicit support messages or tangible assistance. Supportive siblings appeared to buffer children by providing a sense of continuity and shared experience during family reorganization. Sibling support typically served a complementary role to parental support. However, siblings sometimes provided more extensive and direct compensatory support in situations where competent parental support was unavailable. Such assistance helped children to weather especially stressful family breakups but did not mitigate bad feelings about the divorce. The results illustrate the situational and relational nature of effective social support in families.

Acknowledgments

This article was accepted under the editorship of Caryn Medved.

Notes

¹There are a number of established measures of social support (see Vaux, 1992; Wills & Shinar, 2000), including some that assess dimensions of interest in the current study (Barrera, Sandler, & Ramsey, 1981; Vaux, Reidel, & Stewart, 1987). However, the length of these measures made them impractical for our purposes, since all social support items were administered nine times (i.e., respondents completed the same scales for siblings, mothers, and fathers at three points in the interview). Further, existing measures reference forms of support more characteristic of adult social networks (e.g., loaning tools, talking about problems at work). Nonetheless, the social support items parallel items used in established measures, including the Inventory of Socially Supportive Behaviors (ISSB, Barrera et al., 1981) and Social Support Behaviors Scale (SSB, Vaux et al., 1987), with the following differences. First, items in the ISSB and SSB refer to supportive behaviors in more specific terms. The items used here refer to broad types of support rather than specific acts, so that items apply to both sibling and parental relationships. Second, informational support items in the ISSB and SSB include acts of guidance (advice about how to do something) as well as information leading to increased understanding or situational reappraisal. Our informational support items focus only on the latter, which is more relevant to the context of child adjustment to divorce. Third, our fourth support dimension closely parallels the socializing dimension of the SSB (i.e., both involve spending time, doing things, and talking together; see Vaux et al., 1987), but we refer to this dimension as availability/companionship to reflect the context of parental and sibling relationships.