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Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
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Summary
Summary
When stresses and hassles challenge our abilities to cope, we frequently turn to family, friends, and partners for help. Yet social support from close relational partners does not uniformly benefit recipients or their relationships. By probing the communication processes that link enactments of social support to participants' reactions, this book provides new explanations for when and how receiving social support will be evaluated as helpful and relationally satisfying. The author's research addresses a variety of types of relationships and stresses, including young adult friends and romantic partners coping with the stresses of university life; adult friends, family and spouses responding to everyday hassles' and married couples coping with chronic health conditions. This innovative program of research combines qualitative and quantitative methods to develop a distinctive communication-based framework for understanding why the content, form, style, and sequence of talk matter for our evaluations of the help we receive from others.
Author Notes
Daena J. Goldsmith is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her teaching and research span a variety of topics, including social support, communication theory, gender issues, and personal relationships. She is widely published in national and international journals in the areas of communication and personal relationships.
Reviews 1
Choice Review
Goldsmith's premise is that scholars have encountered problems in studying support communication because in measuring enactments they devote insufficient attention to the complexities of the communication process. Accordingly, Goldsmith (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) approaches interpersonal communication as a complex behavior; her goal is to derive predictions about the types of behaviors most likely to improve supportive interactions. She examines 369 references and finds that all theories and empirical findings thus far fail to adequately account for how successful social support is enacted. She devotes four chapters to a detailed examination of current models of social support communication and discusses why they are lacking. By descending into the details of messages and conversations, Goldsmith reveals how current research practices (self-report instruments, coding schemes, etc.) distort or dismiss the myriad ways that support is enacted in close relationships. This is a book for a select group of scholars who research what is labeled "troubles talk." The descriptions and analysis are tediously detailed, but they nonetheless show how faulty methodology and simplified empirical theories can distort complex human communication. Thus, this careful scholarly analysis will help all communication scholars avoid the pitfalls of trying to fit human communication into oversimplified models. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections. R. Cathcart emeritus, CUNY Queens College
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. ix |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 Puzzles in the Study of Enacted Social Support | p. 10 |
| 2 Conceptualizing Enacted Support as Communication | p. 25 |
| 3 Communicating Advice | p. 52 |
| 4 Reexamining Matching Models of Social Support | p. 80 |
| 5 Problematizing Provider/Recipient Roles in Troubles Talk | p. 116 |
| 6 Conclusions and Implications | p. 149 |
| Appendix | p. 165 |
| References | p. 173 |
| Index | p. 197 |
