ABSTRACT
The concepts of social networks and social support have captured the attention of a growing number of researchers and practitioners. Studies suggest that social support has a role in buffering stress (Dean & Lin, 1977; Lin, Simeone, Ensel, & Kuo, 1979) mitigating the effects of physical illness and psychological distress (Gore, 1978; Brown, Brolchain, & Harris, 1975; Henderson, 1977) and influencing the use of professional helping services (McKinley, 1973; Croog, Lipson, & Levine, 1972). Authors cite the study of social networks as a means to understand complex person-environment interactions and inform community interventions (Mitchell & Trickett, 1980; Walker, McBride, & Vachon, 1977; Wellman, 1981; Mueller, 1980). While much of network research can be traced to ideas originating in sociology and anthropology (Gottlieb, 1981; Fischer, 1976), psychologists add their unique concern for the nature of dyadic network relationships and proceed to use a network approach to study the “psychological questions” of individual differences such as differential adaptation to stress and variations in psychological well-being (Hirsch, 1979; Tolsdorf, 1976; Pattison, DeFrancisco, Frazier, Wood, & Crowder, 1975; Wilcox, 1981). However, methodological problems within the area of social network research are many (Sokolvsky & Cohen, 1981; Gottlieb, 1981; Phillips, 1981) and conceptualizations are few (Hirsch, 1981; Marsella, & Snyder, 1981). There is no systematic psychological theory of social networks that permits a set of coherent predictions. Rather, much of the field is characterized by intuitively pleasing ideas about the nature of social networks and social support and a search for empirical relationships conducted in largely ad hoc fashion on a variety of populations. Network measures are often of uncertain construct validity and are largely accepted on the basis of face validity (Stein, 1984).
