Forecasting the specific providers that recipients will perceive as unusually supportive

Abstract

Perceived support primarily reflects the relationships among specific recipients and providers. These strong relational influences suggest a new approach to interventions: Match specific providers with specific recipients so that unusually supportive relationships emerge. For this approach to be successful, progress must be made on several basic research questions. For example, it must be possible to forecast the specific providers that recipients will perceive as unusually supportive (i.e., forecasting relational support). In 2 studies, support recipients had 3 or 5 conversations with the same providers and reported affect, provider supportiveness, and perceived similarity (Study 2 only) after each conversation. Relational support could be forecasted from recipients' reactions to a single, brief conversation with each provider, even after 4 months had elapsed.

Three Generalizability Studies of the Components of Perceived Coach Support

“…In the general social psychology literature target effects are typically small, leading to claims that target effects are relatively unimportant and/or that there are no objectively supportive features of providers 4 . For example, target components have been found to account for less than 10% of the variance in the support perceptions of university freshmen rating psychology majors (Veenstra et al, 2011), university sorority members rating one another , family members rating each other (Branje, van Aken, & van Lieshout, 2002), and medical fellows rating clinical faculty (Giblin & Lakey, 2010). In contrast, as we noted in our introduction, there may be something unique about sport and/or coaching that leads to the higher values we observed in the present studies.…”

“…However, preliminary evidence (Veenstra et al, 2011) For example, some teams might only have one coach, thereby eliminating the potential to match athletes with coaches. In contrast, in individual sports such as athletics, tennis, and golf, athletes might have greater freedom to opt for (or be matched with) a particular coach.…”

Applying Generalizability Theory to Examine the Antecedents of Perceived Coach Support

“…Regardless of whether athletes had actually interacted with the coaches (Study 3) or not (Studies 1 and 2), the relational component consistently accounted for the greatest amount of variance in perceived coach support (29% -41%), in comparison to the provider component (10% -29%) and perceiver component (20% -22%). This evidence suggests that athletes may systematically disagree in their perceptions of the supportiveness of coaches.Such findings mirror those from social psychology (Lakey & Orehek, 2011). A recent review of five studies in which perceivers from non-athletic samples judged the supportiveness of members of their own social networks found that the relational component was the key component of perceived support, accounting on average for 62% of the variance in perceived support, in comparison to 27% for the perceiver component, and 7% for the provider component (Lakey, 2010).…”

“…In sport, the current findings suggest that if one new coach is introduced to a team, members of that team will disagree over the supportiveness of the coach. The relational effects observed in the present research suggest that interventions with the goal to optimize perceptions of coach support might consider matching athletes with coaches whom they perceive as agreeable and competent, and with whom they identify (Lakey, 2010;Veenstra et al, 2011). This matching approach, however, could be time consuming and may not be feasible in all sports or contexts, such as where a team has only one coach.…”

“…First, the present results highlight the utility of employing multivariate generalizability theory as a framework for exploring factors that are related to perceived coach support. A distinct advantage of applying multivariate generalizability theory is that these correlates of perceived coach support can be partitioned into perceiver, provider, and relational components (Lakey & Orehek, 2011), and the relationships between perceptions of support and its correlates can vary across the different components (Lakey, 2010). For example, in the present studies, openness to experience was significantly correlated with perceived coach support at the relational level but not at the perceiver level.…”