Social Support of Elderly Caregivers

Abstract

In this article, the author reviews the concept " social support " from western and eastern perspective, and the concept of adult child caregiver, finally analysize several cases from social support perspective. A wide variety of researchers including anthropologists, physicians, psychologists, and sociologists express interests to study social support and the focus of their studies varies widely. The unit of analysis might be individual, family, community or society. Furthermore, social support has been defined in a variety of ways, but none is unified (Chappell, 1985; Chak, 1996). Yuen-Tsang (1997) summarized the concept of social support and distinguished it into five aspects: functional, structural, subjective, interactional, and the synthetic definition. Several researchers (Oxman & Hull, 1997; Chen & Silverstein, 2000) regarded social support as consisting of structural, functional, and appraisal support, although there are many ways to operationalize this construct: the structural dimension of social support is the composition of the social network and the availability of people to help the individual; the functional dimension represents the amount of instrumental, emotional, and financial backing, the appraisal dimension denotes subjective evaluation of the extent of satisfaction with the support. Tardy (1985) identified five distinct factors in defining the concept at the operational level including: firstly, direction that means social support can be either given to other people or it can be received; secondly, disposition, that means differentiation between perceived support and received support; thirdly, description/evaluation that means a focus on the characteristics of supportive behaviors. The evaluation of social support concerns people's subjective appraisal of what they have received; fourthly, content, that means different theorists have proposed different categorizations of the content; and fifthly, network. According to Krause (2001), social support is best defined as a measure of " social embeddeness (e.g., indicators assessing the frequency of contact with others), received support (e.g., measures of the amount of tangible help actually provided by social network members), and perceived support (subjective evaluations of supportive exchanges) " (Krause,2001, p.273).