ABSTRACT
One point that has been made strongly in several contributions to this volume is the lack of attention paid to the nature of supportive behaviors relative to their complexity—especially given the importance of this in understanding how the words and actions of others may help in confronting stress. I will, therefore, comment on this subject, while referring to some detailed material on the role of lack of social support. The work in question focuses on the onset of clinical depression among women. By adhering to concrete examples, this might help to fill in one corner of the broad theoretical structure that exists in other chapters in this volume. The contextual style of measurement of stress adopted in this research and the situational measures of social support allow a focus on just such an aspect of potentially supportive (or unsupportive) behaviors by various types of support figures at particular points in time, rather than merely reflecting vague general perceptions, with all the possibilities of confounding by response bias that are described in other chapters.
