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Daily Interactions and Affect in Older Adulthood: Family, Friends, and Perceived Support

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Abstract

Research suggests that family and friend support differentially impact well-being, although relatively few studies investigate how these relationships function day-to-day. The first goal of the study was to explore how interactions with family and with friends related to individuals’ daily experience of positive and negative emotion. The second goal of the study was to determine whether the perception that others were available to provide a particular type of support moderated the relationship between friend and family support and well-being each day. Multilevel Random Coefficient Modeling illuminated these linkages in data from 96 participants from Successful Aging in Context: The Macroenvironment and Daily Lived Experience (M Age = 67 years, SD Age = 4.9 years; range 58–86 years). Results revealed significant relationships between affect balance and satisfaction with the amount of support provided by family and by friends; in general, older adults reported a higher ratio of positive to negative affect on days they were more satisfied with the amount of support received from each source. Results of Level-2 analyses suggested that the perception that others were available to provide tangible assistance strengthened the relationship between satisfaction with family support and daily well-being; likewise, the availability of emotional support and advice strengthened the daily friend support–affect balance association. Overall, results suggest that global perceptions that network members are available to provide different types of support differentially augment the relationships between the social support older adults receive from friends and family each day and well-being; in so doing, these results suggest ways in which older adults can benefit most from existing support.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that the factor loading for the advice/coping factor exceeds one for the item “Some to give you good advice about a crisis”. Although this may indicate a Heywood case [i.e., an instance where a unique variance estimate is on the boundary of 0 (Lawley and Maxwell 1971)], this was not the case in the current analyses; the residual variance for this item was estimated to be .26 and no errors or warning messages were obtained from the iterative-based estimation procedure that was used in Mplus. Instead, this factor loading likely indicates that the communality (shared variance between an item and the associated latent factor) is close to 1.0 (van Driel 1978), which seems reasonable given the close relation between the item (i.e., “Some to give you good advice about a crisis”) and the latent factor (i.e., advice/coping).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Janette Abbasi, Madelyn Daly, Annmarie Gast, Tanya Gupta, Nathalie Macias, Lauren Nielsen, Jairo Rosales, and Margaret Stanielun for their contributions to the conception of this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Illinois Wesleyan University, PO Box 2900, Bloomington, IL, 61702, USA

    Mignon A. Montpetit & Niccole A. Nelson

  2. Oregon Social Learning Center, 10 Shelton McMurphey Blvd, Eugene, OR, 97401, USA

    Stacey S. Tiberio

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  1. Mignon A. Montpetit
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  2. Niccole A. Nelson
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  3. Stacey S. Tiberio
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Correspondence to Mignon A. Montpetit.

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This study has been approved by the Illinois Wesleyan University Institutional Review Board, which ensures ethical treatment of human subjects. As part of said ethical treatment, informed consent was obtained from each participant for both aspects of the study (i.e., questionnaire and daily components).

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Montpetit, M.A., Nelson, N.A. & Tiberio, S.S. Daily Interactions and Affect in Older Adulthood: Family, Friends, and Perceived Support. J Happiness Stud 18, 373–388 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-016-9730-4

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