Understanding the role of social support on psychological distress among older Canadians: An investigation of the National Population Health Survey

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the reciprocal association between various dimensions of social support and psychological distress and whether social support acted as a buffer against chronic stressors for a population of older Canadians. This thesis was composed of three studies, all of which used data from the National Population Health Survey. The first study reported on the psychometric properties, factorial structure, and measurement invariance of the Medical Outcomes Study social support scale for a sample of French and English-speaking older Canadians. Results indicated good internal consistency. The confirmatory factor analysis revealed acceptable fit indices for the 4-factor structure and that the scale functions uniformly across both groups. The second study investigated the longitudinal bidirectional relationship between the different dimensions of social support and psychological distress using an autoregressive cross-lagged model for fives waves of data. Some support for the reciprocal relationship between affectionate support and distress was found with higher distress predicting higher affectionate support and higher support predicting higher distress. Higher distress also predicted subsequently higher levels of positive social interaction and emotional/informational support. Little support was found for a reciprocal relationship between structural support and tangible support and psychological distress. The objective of the third study was to look at the cross-sectional and longitudinal interactions between chronic stressors and functional social support on psychological distress in a sample of older Canadians. From the cross-sectional analyses, significant interactions were found for tangible and emotional/informational support. The findings provided no evidence of buffering effects of positive social interaction and affectionate support on the association between chronic stressors and psychological distress. For the longitudinal analysis, the stress-buffering hypothesis was only supported for one wave of data with social support acting as a buffer against the relationship between chronic stressors in 2002/2003 and subsequent psychological distress two years later (2004/2005). Implications of the studies included in this thesis and future research needs are discussed.