Social Support, Depression, and Anxiety in Female Adolescents: Associations and Profiles

Adolescents’ social support networks and long-term psychosocial outcomes

“…This finding supports the hypothesis that socially poor groups, or individuals with low to moderate support across all sources, have the poorest psychosocial outcomes. While previous research studies have supported this hypothesis in terms of concurrent outcomes (Ciarrochi et al, 2017;Ahlborg et al, 2019;Kelly & Malecki, 2021), our findings extend this hypothesis to long-term outcomes as well.…”

“…Researchers have also examined depressive symptoms across profiles of social support with more than two sources. In their study of female adolescents, Kelly and Malecki (2021) found that profiles with moderate levels of support from parents, teachers, or classmates and profiles with low sibling support reported the highest levels of depressive symptoms. Both of these studies focused on depressive symptoms during adolescence.…”

“…It is important, therefore, to explore the relative contribution of each source to different outcomes, as well as how multiple sources work in conjunction with one another. Recently, there have been several investigations of how combinations or “profiles” of support affect individuals (Ciarrochi et al, 2017; Ahlborg et al, 2019; Kelly & Malecki, 2021). This “pattern-centered” or “person-centered” approach (Antonucci et al, 2010) is vital to understanding the complexities of social support networks as individual sources of support hardly ever work in isolation, but rather in the context of other relationships.…”

“…Two studies (Ciarrochi et al, 2017; Ahlborg et al, 2019) identified one “socially rich” profile that was characterized by high support across all sources and reported the best outcomes, as well as a “socially poor” profile characterized by low support across all sources and the worst outcomes. Jager (2011) identified only a “socially poor” profile while Kelly and Malecki (2021) identified only a “socially rich” profile. We hypothesized that the LCA in our study would yield a socially rich profile associated with the best outcomes and a socially poor profile associated with the worst outcomes.…”

Social support profiles correlate with depressive symptoms among Chinese parents during the COVID-19 pandemic: A latent profile analysis

“…Social support may be associated with depressive symptoms in adults, yet evidence for this association is mixed. A wealth of research revealed that social support acted as an important environmental resource alleviating pressure on an individual and was closely related to the prevention of depressive symptoms ( Kelly and Malecki, 2022 ; Li et al, 2021 ). However, reverse causality may exist between social support and depressive symptoms, as demonstrated in previous research ( Guo et al, 2018 ).…”