Social support and affect: daily associations in patients after haematopoietic stem cell transplantation

Abstract

Background: Few studies concern social support processes accompanying everyday life of patients who have experienced hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). The present study addresses this gap by examining effect of patient’s daily received and provided support on their daily positive (PA) and negative affect (NA). Methods: Eighty-nine patients after first autologous or allogeneic HSCT (age M = 49.1, SD = 13.49; 49.4%% men) reported received and provided social support as well as affect for up to 28 consecutive evenings (starting from the first day after discharge from transplantation unit). Multilevel modeling was used to investigate fixed and random within- and between-day effects for PA and NA separately, with both provided and received support as predictors and time as a covariate. Findings: Multilevel analyses indicated that daily support provision was significantly associated with both PA (β = 0.22, t37.98 = 6.14, p <.001) and NA (β = -0.14, t49.32 = -3.85, p <.001), whereas support receiving was unrelated to daily affect. That is, patients experienced higher daily PA and lower daily NA in the support provision days. Between-subject association was noted only between provided support and PA, yet only at the tendency level (β = 0.39, t83.72 = 1.80, p =.075). Discussion: Findings suggest that support provision may have positive associations with emotional component of well-being in patients after HSCT, which is in congruence with the esteem-enhancement theory and the previous studies.