Daily support in couples coping with early stage breast cancer: maintaining intimacy during adversity

Recent work has identified intimacy as a potentially important determinant of psychological adjustment in couples coping with cancer. Little work has examined specific social support processes within the context of the everyday life of couples' cancer experience. Specifically, we examined the links between breast cancer patient reports of receiving support from one's spouse/partner (support receipt) and spouse reports of providing support to the patient (support provision) with daily intimacy outcomes. We hypothesized that both patient and spouse would benefit from support receipt and support provision.

Forty-five women with early stage breast cancer and their spouses independently completed an Internet-based electronic diary assessing support receipt, support provision, and relationship intimacy for seven consecutive evenings shortly after surgery. Study outcomes consisted of daily relationship intimacy reported by each partner.

As hypothesized, when controlling for patient report of support receipt, spouse report of support provision was uniquely associated with a significant additional increase in feelings of relationship intimacy for patients. Moreover, the independent effects of support receipt and support provision were also found to be beneficial for nonpatient spouses' daily feelings of intimacy.

Findings highlight the use of dyadic diary methods and corresponding modeling to uncover the unique benefits of support provision that may sometimes occur outside the awareness of the recipient. Results are discussed in terms of conceptualizing the cancer experience in a shared interpersonal context, whereby patients and their spouses can both benefit from support as they adjust to cancer together.