Let's hang up and try again: lessons learned from a social support intervention

A support intervention by Heller et al. (1991) sought to improve the well-being of elderly women by providing friendly telephone contact with staff or peers. The failure of this thoughtful and carefully implemented intervention serves to highlight the difficulty of designing support interventions. Several lessons are discussed regarding the complexity of the support process, the utility of different research strategies, the importance of specifying the targeted focal point in the support process, the need to state models explicitly, the choice of measures, and the implications of select participant samples.