Social Support

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Critically consider how different types of social support can have a positive influence on undergraduate students’ ability to cope with stress? Speculations on whether social support can have a positive effect on individual’s psychological well-being have been queried by many psychologists. Social support comes in various forms; this may be a reliable group or a valued individual. This essay will explain some of the different types of social support but primarily will focus on whether social support does indeed reduce the psychological and physiological consequences of stress for undergraduate students. Emotional sustenance and informational support have been famously identified by Thoits (2014) as the two broad types of social support, which …show more content…
The definition of social support is “It is a positive term that connotes beneficent intentions or consequences” Thoits (2011). Many psychologists have argued against this definition simply because it disregards the “dark side “of social support, however, Thoits focuses on the positive side of social support. Willis & Ainette (2012) alternatively found that for individual suffering from mental health conditions such as experiencing negative aspects of social support e.g. (spousal criticism) can restrict the individual from recovering in the near future and prevent adjustment. A major stressor for students entering higher education can be workload as students can find it difficult to juggle their education and personal lives. The way in which students can overcome this stressor is through social support. A type of social support known as emotional sustenance is found to be vital for the transition into university, as it can enable individuals to deal with uncertainties and most importantly workload stress. Research conducted on undergraduate nurses …show more content…
Social support is able to help adapt the undergraduate students to their new educational environment and provide not only emotional support but also informational. A study which demonstrated this comes from (Wilcox, Winn and Fyvie-Gauld) who researched a sample of 34 students, from the university of Brighton. The research focused primarily on those who withdrew from their first year in university and found that a contributing factor for their decision was social support. The students who withdrew from the university stated that staff who gave a negative impression managed to influence their decision to leave university. The research uses qualitative interviews, which means that the research is high in validity and the researchers are able to probe further to obtain as much detailed qualitative data. However, it can also be argued that the study is limited to only social science students, whereby the female population was 80%, therefore it can be suggested that there is gender bias. Females are known to have both nurturing and emotional characteristics which mean that they may be affected more by stressors compared to males. One way in which undergraduate students are able to adjust better to the educational environment and deal with workload stress can be to have personal meetings with their
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