Helpful, Supportive and Sensitive: Measuring the Evaluation of Enacted Social Support in Personal Relationships

Several recent studies have sought to identify characteristics of better and worse attempts at support provision; however, there has been little explicit theoretical attention to the ways in which recipients evaluate enacted support. We developed a multidimensional scale to measure these evaluations. Study 1 asked 122 adults to interpret the meaning of three adjectives (helpful, supportive, sensitive) used in previous research. Although the meanings of these terms overlap, respondents associated helpful with problem-solving utility, supportive with relational assurance, and sensitivity with emotional awareness. Study 2 asked 396 students to rate a recalled conversation on 30 semantic-differential-type scales derived from Study 1. These ratings provided a basis for selecting 12 items to form valid and reliable scales of problem-solving utility, relational assurance, and emotional awareness. Study 3 provides independent validation of factor structure, scale reliability and validity, and conceptual distinctiveness. We discuss a variety of research questions for which this multidimensional scale may be a useful tool.