Interpersonal Processes of Couples’ Daily Support for Goal Pursuit: The Example of Physical Activity

Abstract

Little is known about how couples' social support facilitates the pursuit of important goals in daily life. Using an interpersonal perspective, we examined the effects of support provision and receipt on same-day physical activity, and studied the role of partners' joint engagement in activities. One hundred nineteen heterosexual couples reported on target persons' received and partners' provided support across 28 diary days, yielding 2,854 valid days. A dyadic report on couples' joint engagement was obtained from a subset of 88 couples. Target persons' daily activity was objectively assessed via accelerometers. On days with high versus low levels of provided support, target persons' activity was 25 min higher. Support receipt mediated 20% of this effect. Joint engagement accounted for around half of the effects of provided and received support. Support provision is uniquely linked to goal implementation in everyday life. Joint engagement in activities may be one explanation for how support is facilitated.

Moving in Sync: Hourly Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior are Synchronized in Couples

“…Partners may further serve as each other's role models for health-related behaviors [47,48]. Besides shared routines and environments, partners may also actively influence each other's behavior through social exchange processes, including spousal control or support [15,49]. In both studies, partners spent a substantial amount of time together, which indicates that a large share of activity assessments were spent in close physical proximity.…”

How men receive and utilise partner support when trying to change their diet and physical activity within a men’s weight management programme

“…Social support (provision or exchange of instrumental, emotional or informational assistance or resources that may arise from interpersonal relationships) is one aspect of social context that has been seen as helpful in making and maintaining behaviour change [6,16,17]. While this literature has extensively focussed on the provision of support [6,16] and the types of support that can be provided [18][19][20][21][22], much less consideration has been given to how and if support is utilised by the 'receiver'.…”

Parenting styles moderate how parent and adolescent beliefs shape each other's eating and physical activity: Dyadic evidence from a cross-sectional, U.S. National Survey

“…Given that dominant psychological theories of health behavior emerged during the cognitive revolution, it is not surprising that they focus on how an individual's own characteristics (e.g., their beliefs) influence their own behavior instead of focusing on interpersonal explanations. There is a growing interest in the effects of interpersonal influence (Berli et al, 2016(Berli et al, , 2018Dwyer et al, 2017;Guidetti et al, 2012), and the emergence of dyadic modeling techniques has enabled researchers to measure and model the influence of key characteristics of significant others, and to delineate the conditions under which these factors expand our ability to predict health-relevant intentions and behaviors (Karney et al, 2010). Our results demonstrate that a dyadic approach to theories of health behavior has the potential to introduce greater clarity and specificity into our theorizing.…”