Social support in spouses of cancer patients: What do they get and to what end?

Using a retrospective design, the authors assessed several different aspects of social support (perceived, received, satisfaction with received, and support seeking) in 95 spouses of cancer survivors. The goals of the investigation were to (a) describe in detail the differences between husbands and wives on these support dimensions and (b) explore whether the relation between support and adjustment was different for husbands as compared to wives. While husbands and wives were generally similar in their general perceptions of available support and in the amount of support they reported seeking, consistent with our hypothesis, compared to husbands of breast cancer victims, wives of prostate cancer victims reported receiving more support and being more satisfied with the support they received. Measures of social support predicted husbands' reports of marital satisfaction and adjustment, but not wives' reports. Partial correlation analyses indicated that sex differences in these support-adjustment links were not attributable to differences in age, or in the time between completing treatment and participating in the study Sex differences observed in the present study are interpreted as highlighting the need for theory development to account for the complex mechanisms underlying links between supportive transactions and marital satisfaction and adjustment.