Author Description

This dissertation, "Toward a Relativistic Approach to Social Support" by Man-pui, Sally, Chan,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: People depend heavily on various forms of assistance, guidance, and care for survival, which leads many to view social support as definitively beneficial. However, recent studies have provided the counterargument that social support is not necessarily a panacea for coping with stress. A considerable number of studies have been conducted on social support, yet the majority of the theoretical models developed to understand its influence have focused on its benefits, with few exploring the negative support effects from the relational aspect. No studies have attempted to explain support effects from the perspective of individual differences. More importantly, the underlying social support mechanism and the roles played by the different modes of social support remain unknown. Building on the available theoretical insights, a relativistic approach is adopted here to study social support. A hybrid self-focus model of social support is proposed to understand the relationships between personality resources (specifically self-esteem) and levels of affect (positive and negative), the underlying mechanism of self-focus processes (public self-consciousness and social comparison), and the moderating role of the mode of social support (offline and online). The two studies incorporated correlational and quasi-experimental methodologies conducted to examine the proposed model among participants from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Study 1 was correlational and applied a