Concerned Significant Others' Experiences as Support Providers After Traumatic Injury
van Stolk-Cooke, Katherine A
van Stolk-Cooke, Katherine A
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Abstract
Social support is considered a protective factor against the development of PTSD after a trauma. However, examinations of the social support-PTSD relationship have primarily focused on the perspective of trauma exposed individuals to the exclusion of their support providers. The present study examined the self-reported experiences of Concerned Significant Others (CSOs) recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) who served as support providers to a traumatically injured romantic partner (N = 144). Items assessed the degree to which CSOs provided tangible, emotional, esteem, informational, and network support for their target significant other (TSO), how difficult CSOs found support provision, and how effective CSOs thought that provision was for trauma survivor recovery. Results suggested that CSOs’ reported difficulty providing each support type was associated with poorer perceived recovery trajectories in their traumatized significant others: tangible (b = .94, t[135] = 2.91, p = .004), emotional (b = 1.54, t[135] = 4.19, p < .001), esteem (b = 1.02, t[134] = 2.74, p = .007), informational (b = .95, t[135] = 2.82, p = .006), and network (b = 1.03, t[135] = 2.85, p = .005). The more difficult CSOs found it to provide each type of support, the less improvement they saw in their traumatized significant other’s functioning. These findings indicate that CSOs’ internal experiences of support provision may impact trauma survivor recovery trajectories after a traumatic event.
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Date
2019-01-01
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Graduate
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Psychological Science
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College of Arts and Sciences
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Social Sciences