ABSTRACT
There is now an impressive accumulation of ideas about social support. An excellent example is the 1985 edited volume Social Support and Health by S. Cohen and S. L. Syme (1985). My aim is not to add to these ideas, but to discuss the modest success of efforts to translate them into effective research. Although my colleagues and I have concluded that social support is important in the development of clinical depression (Brown, Andrews, Harris, Adler, & Bridge, 1986), our published accounts fail to convey the difficulty experienced in documenting this, and this would seem an appropriate occasion for this to be rectified.
