Does Social Relationship Facilitate Posttraumatic Growth? Distinguishing Perceived Social Support and Accessible Social Resources

Posttraumatic Growth (PTG) is a positive change that might occur after some serious traumatic events (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). Compared to resilience (i.e., ability to recover when facing trauma), PTG is more like a transformation where people’s thoughts, behaviors, interests might all grow or change in a positive way (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). These positive changes are typically classified into 5 domains: symptoms including appreciation of life, spiritual change, new possibilities, etc. (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996). Researchers have found that PTG is positively associated with ongoing distress, demonstrating that stressful life events could have potentially positive impacts (Loiselle, Devine, Reed-Knight, & Blount, 2011). Indeed, a handful of studies have found a positive association between social support and PTG. For example, Yongju and colleagues (2014) found that social support is strongly associated with PTG in a sample of Chinese women with infertility. Another study in Chinese rescue workers showed that social support is partially playing a mediating role between self-acceptance and PTG and it suggested that individuals with a good social support system can help provide more spiritual support for people to cope with trauma (Zhao, An, Sun, & Liu, 2020). A cross-sectional Cancer study also indicated that social support has a significant positive correlation with PTG which are consistent with the idea that the spiritual support provided by social support can help people better deal with the information from trauma (Roohi, Salehi, Mahmoodzadeh, & Morovati, 2020). However, these studies used underrepresented sample with restricted types of traumatic events, which limits the generalizability of the conclusion. Moreover, existing studies have largely overlooked the distinction between subjectively perceived social support and objectively accessible social resources. Theories from social cognitive support the idea that subjectively perceived social support has a greater impact on people’s mental health, as perceived support has consequences on how we think about, react to, and subsequently, utilize received support or accessible social resources (Lakey & Drew, 1997). In the present study, we operationalize subjectively perceived social support as self-report feelings of supportiveness, and objectively accessible social resources as socioeconomic status and social network diversity, respectively. We will use the Perceived Social Support Scale (PSSS; Zimet et al., 1988) to measure subjectively perceived social support, and objectively accessible social resources will be measured as socioeconomic status and social network diversity. In accordance with the social-cognitive model of social support (Lakey & Drew, 1997), We hypothesize that compared to objectively accessible social resources, perceived social support will have a stronger association with PTG.