Cancer patients and the provision of informational social support

Research into the impact of social support on health-care patients has focused on the benefits of receiving social support. Although recipients benefit from social support, there are also potential benefits to the providers of social support that have gone relatively unexplored. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the relationship between the reception and provision of informational social support by cancer patients. Based on the work of Gouldner (1960), this investigation attempts to examine the role reciprocity plays within the social support process. The norm of reciprocity is conceptualized as a generalized moral belief rather than as a simple pattern of exchange between caregivers and care receivers. Use of reciprocity as a generalized moral belief instead of a pattern of behavioral exchange between providers and recipients of social support allows a more thorough integration theoretically and more methodical examination of the role the relationship between providers and recipients plays in this process. Specifically, this investigation employs the notion of optimal matching as part of the mechanism underlying the satisfactions derived from informational social support. The results of the logistic regression analyses suggest that reciprocity is a viable explanation of the mechanism underlying the desire to provide social support to others among cancer patients and among adults who have never been diagnosed with cancer. This relationship between the reception and the provision of informational social support remains even after controlling for age, education, gender, race, social integration, and cancer diagnosis. Implications for the social support literature are discussed.