Exploring the associations between social support and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder among Malaysian and Australian trauma survivors

Figures & data

Table 1. Participant characteristics and group means (SD) for social support measures.

Variable	Australian group	Malaysian group
Age	34.11 (9.18)	26.42 (7.12)
Gender (Man: Woman: Non-binary/Gender diverse)	45:43:3	27:60:4
Education^a	15:39:29:7:0:1	4:9:60:15:2:1
Trauma type^b	23:4:30:14:0:4:9:7	25:4:12:19:1:6:14:10
Number of Traumatic Life Events	8.40 (4.98)	8.36 (4.50)
Time since trauma (years)	7.75 (12.13)	6.55 (6.10)
Independent self-construal	71.58 (12.65)	72.82 (12.16)
Interdependent self-construal	69.37 (13.52)	73.00 (10.47)
PTSD Symptoms	36.03 (18.00)	35.99 (18.79)
Depression Symptoms	34.77 (9.51)	33.27 (12.16)
Anxiety Symptoms	21.78 (6.09)	19.77 (7.03)
Implicit Social Support	19.97 (5.87)	22.53 (5.66)
Explicit Social Support	39.26 (9.77)	41.65 (10.83)
Family Support	4.09 (1.87)	4.32 (2.28)
Significant Other Support	4.96 (2.09)	4.55 (2.24)
Friend Support	4.15 (1.51)	4.87 (1.68)
Tendency to Seek Support	29.13 (6.37)	29.33 (5.37)
Psychological Openness	22.71 (7.19)	24.82 (5.75)
Indifference to Stigma	22.77 (6.31)	19.93 (6.45)

^a Secondary: Post-Secondary: Undergraduate: Post-graduate: Other: Prefer not to say.

^b Trauma type refers to the event participants indicated as the worst trauma that still bothers them the most. The PCL-5 was answered in relation to this trauma event. Trauma types included: Accident, injury, assault:natural disaster: sexual assault: war: unexpected death and life-threatening illness. There were no cultural group differences in trauma type distribution, χ²(7,182) = 11.57, p = .12.

Figure 1. Simple slopes for the explicit social support moderation analyses.

Figure 2. Simple slopes for support from family moderation analyses.

Figure 3. Mean negative affect (Figure 3a) and mean subjective distress (Figure 3b) for the Malaysian and Australian groups in the non-mutual social support and mutual social support conditions.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/z8ekf/.