Social Support: Multidisciplinary Review, Synthesis, and Future Agenda

Social support research proliferated across multiple disciplines for more than a half century. This growth, as well as disciplinary differences, resulted in mixed views, conceptualizations, and operationalizations. This review synthesizes knowledge and empirical findings from more than 4,500 studies across disciplines. We summarize several characteristics of social support studied in the literature: quantity and quality, utilization, source,...