Thesis

positive effect of social support in that that if a person is receiving higher social support
he/she has an enhanced psychological well-being.
According to Bradley & Cartwright (2002) social support has been widely recognized as
being a mediator between work stressors and work stress outcomes. Social support at ones
workplace has been well accepted as a variable related to work stress. To better understand
the concept of social support at a person’s workplace, one can look at the job demand-control
model of stress. The previously mentioned model says that an increased job strain is a direct
result of low social support, high work demand, and low control (Karasek & Theorell, 1990).
If one looks at social support and health in general, one can see that there is evidence for that
social support has an effect on health by looking at data from epidemiological studies (Dean,
Holst, Kreiner, Schoenborn & Wilson, 1994). According to Bradley & Cartwright (2002) one
can say that the research on social support comes from a universal theory of social support
where researchers have used variables like for example attendance to church and marital
status as substitute variables for looking at social support and to explain social integration in
the society. Another approach which has been used to look at social support has been a more
qualitative one. This approach is using many different ways of defining social support, all the
way from using global perspectives of the concept to multidimensional models which are
more specific in their explanations of social support (e.g., emotional support, informational
support, network support etc). According to Veile & Bauman (1992, in Bradley & Cartwright,
2002) social support can be interpreted in many different ways and has been done so in the
literature, and the concept has been used to describe characteristics of people, the environment
or the interaction between these two.
Shumaker & Brownell (1984) stated that the majority of the research done in the field of
social support and health has assumed that social support has a beneficial effect on health.
However, the process by which this influence is said to be positive is not well-known.
Rationalization of how social support is influencing health has been taken from two different
models of social support, the direct model of social support and the indirect (also called the
buffer model) model of social support. The effect that social support has on health can be
looked on at different levels, like for example at a physiological level and at a social level.
The physiological level for example states that the social support itself gives a person
opportunities for attachments and relationships (Fiske, 1998) and that those attachments and