Study suggests friendships make one feel more supported

Results showed that the denser the networks, the more support that participants said they would be able to receive from them.

A recent study revealed that people perceive they had more support from friends or family who knew and liked each other. The study was conducted in comparison with an identical number of close relationships that were not linked.

The results suggest that having a network of people to lean on is only part of what makes social support so beneficial to us, said David Lee, who led the study as a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at The Ohio State University.

“The more cohesive, the more dense this network you have, the more you feel you can rely on them for support,” said Lee, who is now an assistant professor of communication at the University at Buffalo. “It matters if your friends can depend on each other, just like you depend on them,” added Lee.

Lee conducted the study with Joseph Bayer, assistant professor of communication, and Jonathan Stahl, a graduate student in psychology, both at Ohio State. Their research was published online recently in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly.

The researchers conducted two online studies. In one study, 339 people were asked to list eight people in their lives that they could go to for support in the last six months. Participants rated on a scale of 1 to 7 how much support they received from each person. (Most were listed as friends or family members, but some people also named co-workers, romantic partners, classmates or roommates).

Crucial for this study, participants were also asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 7 how close each possible pair of their eight supporters were to each other (from “they don’t know each other” to “extremely close”). Based on those answers, the researchers calculated the density of each participant’s network — the closer and more interconnected their friends and family were to each other, the denser the network.

Results showed that the denser the networks, the more support that participants said they would be able to receive from them. “We found that our support networks are more than the sum of their parts,” said Bayer, who is a core faculty of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute.

“People who feel they have more social support in their lives may be focusing more on the collective support they feel from being part of a strong, cohesive group. It’s having a real crew, as opposed to just having a set of friends,” added Bayer.