Although support seekers and providers each make the same number of utterances, seekers speak longer

1
Asking for Help Seeking and Providing Support in
Adolescent and Adult Romantic Relationships
Jessica Greenberg, Brooke Nicole Crickitt, Nancy
Darling
Thanks to the many participants who shared their
lives with us, to the students at Bard College
who worked on recruitment and data collection,
and to the many Oberlin students involved in
coding these data. We would particularly like to
thank Erika van der Velden, Sara Clarke, Amanda
SellenRose Meacham, Clayton Kennedy, and
especially Andrew Burns. This poster can be
downloaded from http//oberlin.edu/faculty/ndarlin
g/lab/ead.htm.
Methods
Results
Abstract
How does the content of adults and adolescents
supportive behavior differ?
How do seekers and providers differ? The mean
number of utterances, the percent time that each
person spoke, the mean duration of utterances,
and the number of positive and negative
non-verbal behaviors were calculated for support
seekers and support providers.

• Procedure
• Married couples and adolescent couples were
  scheduled for two-hour laboratory visits at
  separate times. Prior to collection of
  questionnaire and videotaped observational data,
  informed consent was obtained. Adolescent
  participants younger than 18 years old also
  provided signed consent from a parent. Each
  participant completed questionnaires
  independently and participated in four videotaped
  problem solving conversations a social support
  and a conflict resolution task. Only data from
  the social support task were analyzed for the
  current paper.
• Adolescents were asked to complete questionnaires
  about global attachment to romantic partners the
  quality, functioning, and attachment in their
  current romantic relationship perceptions of
  their parents marital quality and functioning
  relationships functioning and attachment with
  respect to their mother and father, emotional
  well-being and problem behavior.
• Parents were asked to complete questionnaires
  about marital attachment and the quality and
  functioning of their marriage and the quality and
  functioning of their relationship with the target
  adolescent. Each partner chose a problem outside
  the relationship to discuss for the 10-minute
  social support task, with the order of the
  initiating partner determined by coin flip. At
  the end of the lab visit, couples were debriefed.
  Adolescents were each paid 35 and videorecorded
  parents 60 each for participation, plus 5 per
  couple for gas.
• Measures
• Observed social support behavior. The 10-minute
  social support conversations were coded in four
  steps. This project relies on a microcoding
  system developed for this study.
• The beginning and end point of each utterance
  was identified by speaker (support seeker or
  support provider).
• The content of the utterance was identified as
  primarily emotional, primarily issue, both, or
  neither.
• The substance of each utterance was identified by
  goal
• Support seekers utterances were coded as

Do adolescents and adults differ in how they seek
and provide social support from their romantic
partners? Micro-analytic coding at the utterance
level was used to examine the content and
duration of support behaviors in this matched
sample of 30 adolescent and adult romantic
couples. The overall pattern of results
indicates that adolescents explain themselves
less, acknowledge each other less, and provide
less positive and more negative non-verbal
feedback than do adults. Adult supporters also
contribute more actively to support seeking
conversations.
Introduction
By middle and late adolescence, most adolescents
have been involved in romantic relationships and
romantic partners become a primary source of
social support. The importance of romantic
partners as support providers remains important
throughout adulthood, particularly within
marriage . Although it is tempting to assume
that what we know from the rich, process-oriented
literature on marriage can be generalized to
adolescent romantic couples, differences in the
level of commitment, duration, and intimacy of
relationships during these two developmental
periods makes this assumption questionable. In
addition, because most middle adolescents are
relatively inexperienced in intimate cross-gender
relationships , they may be less effective at
communicating with opposite sex peers and less
effective at soliciting and providing support.
The goal of the current study is to compare
adolescent romantic partners and a matched sample
of adults (their married parents) in terms of how
they elicit and provide support. Research on
social support indicates that some sources of
support may function differently than others.
Social support is thought to be most effective
when it comes from individuals who are socially
similar in values and characteristics (Dehle,
2001). Establishing a supportive and caring
relationship with a romantic partner is a primary
goal for most individuals and an important
predictor of health and well-being (Baumeister
Leary, 1995 Uchino, Cacioppo, Keicolt-Glaser,
1996). However, developing mutually supportive
relationships are not always easy. How each
partner caters to the others emotional and
cognitive needs is highly variable and is
dependent on many different factors. Partners
often differ in their willingness and ability to
respond to one anothers needs and to provide the
type of support that promotes one anothers
welfare and relationship satisfaction. Do
adolescents differ from adults in how they elicit
and provide social support to one another?
Conclusion

• Although support seekers and providers each make
  the same number of utterances, seekers speak
  longer.
• Support providers make more non-verbal positive
  indications that they are listening.

• Although teen support seekers make slightly more
  direct requests for help, adults spend more time
  explaining their requests.
• There is no difference in indirect requests for
  help.
• Adult support seekers seem to listen to providers
  more than do teens.
• In particular, they agree more, negate less, and
  provide more neutral (i.e., considering)
  responses and these responses are of longer
  duration.
• Adult and adolescent support providers differ
  less in the number or content of utterances than
  they do in their duration.
• Adult providers spend more time providing
  constructive, negative, and particularly neutral
  comments.
• Subsequent analysis suggests that much of the
  neutral content is in providing and soliciting
  additional information to facilitate problem
  solving.

Do adolescent and adult seekers and providers
differ? The mean number of utterances, the
percent time that each person spoke, and the mean
duration of utterances, and positive and negative
non-verbal behaviors were calculated for support
seekers and support providers by age.

• Adolescent support seekers differed from adj.ts
  in speaking more, but in shorter bursts.
• Adolescents were also more likely to provide
  negative non-verbal cues to support providers and
  were less likely to provide non-verbal cues that
  they were listening and agreeing.
• Adolescent support providers also made more
  utterances and in shorter bursts than did adults.
  
• Adult support providers, however, spoke for a
  greater proportion of time (e.g., they
  contributed more to the conversation relative to
  the seeker) than did adolescents.
• Like seekers, adolescent providers provided more
  negative and fewer positive non-verbal cues than
  adults.

Methods
Sample The data used in this project represent a
subset of a larger multi-method observational
study of 103 adolescent romantic couples and the
married parents of one member of the adolescent
couple. The present study involved observations
of 15 mother-father and 15 adolescent-romantic
partner dyads. All families were initially
recruited through identification of a target
adolescent in their junior or senior year in high
school who was currently involved in a romantic
relationship lasting four weeks or longer. In
addition to these criteria, the parents of at
least one adolescent romantic partner needed to
be currently married to one another. After the
target adolescent and their romantic partner were
recruited into the study, the currently married
biological parents of one member of the
adolescent romantic couple were then contacted
and recruited to participate. The current paper
thus reports on data from 30 parents (15 couples)
and 30 adolescent romantic partners (15
couples). On average, married couples had been
married 23 years (range15-37, sd4.8) and
adolescent couples had dated for 12 months
(range1-38, sd 9.7) at the time of the study.
The mean age for husbands and wives was 50.7
years (sd 6.7) and 48.1 (sd5.8), respectively.
The mean age for male and female adolescents was
17.8 (sd1.3) and 17.1 (sd1.0), respectively.
Parents had an average of 15.5 years of
education, ranging from 12-22 years with 83 of
families reporting earning over 50,000 per year.

Conclusions

• The overall pattern of responses suggests
  differences between both support seekers and
  providers and between adults and adolescents.
• Adolescent seekers and providers tend to speak
  more, but in shorter bursts than adults.
• Adolescents also tend to provide more negative
  and less positive non-verbal feedback to their
  partners.
• Adults in both the support seeker and support
  provider role speak in longer utterances and
  provide more feedback to their partners, both in
  terms of verbal and non-verbal acknowledgement.
• Overall, adult support providers play a more
  active role in the conversation. They nod more
  when their partner is speaking, they provide and
  seek more information, and they speak more.