The impact of gender role conflict on multidimensional social support in older men.

This study examines the impact of gender role conflict on the perceived social support in a sample of older men aged 40-86. Three-hundred eighty-nine men completed a survey measuring gender role conflict and multidimensional social support. Canonical correlation was used to explore possible dimensions between the four gender role conflict factors and differing dimensions of social support. Only one canonical variate was interpretable and indicated that all four subscales of the Gender Role Conflict Scale appeared inversely and significantly related to Emotional/Informational Support, Affective Support, and Positive Social Interaction. These findings suggest that gender role conflict in older men may limit their perception of the availability of social support thereby restricting men's ability to appreciate the beneficial effects of supporting relationships. Study limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

Keywords: men's health, gender role conflict, aging, social support

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The explanatory power of social support on health outcomes has expanded in the past 20 years to suggest that health scientists utilize this construct in planning interventions while continuing to inquire about how to improve our understanding of how it operates in the lives of diverse populations. While it has been suggested that social support operates differently between men and women, few have provided empirical evidence that would improve our understanding of the correlates of social support related to gender ideologies. The purpose of this research is to examine the extent to which perceived social support may be impacted by gender role conflict within older men.

Health promotion literature is replete with studies linking social support to health outcomes. Positive relationships exist between social support and health practices (Berkman & Syme, 1979; House, Robbins, & Metzner, 1982), and recent studies indicate that low social support is related to depression (Kendler, Myers, & Prescott, 2005), sedentary behaviors (Brummett et al., 2005), suicide (Duberstein, Conwell, Conner, Eberly, Evinger, & Caine, 2004), and all-cause mortality (Iribarren et al., 2005). Despite significant heterogeneity in the theoretical ideology of social support, many health promotion specialists subscribe to a stress buffering hypothesis whereby the individual's perception of the availability of social support buffers against a variety of threatening stressors (Cohen & Wills, 1985).

Stress-centered models of social support posit that social support is primarily beneficial for persons under stress, and that the perception of adequate support may mediate the experience of stress and the onset of negative health outcomes through bolstering the ability to cope with the stressor, eliminating the affective reaction, influencing physiologic processes, or altering maladaptive behavior responses (Cohen. 1988). A further requirement of stress-centered models asserts that the form social support takes must match the needs of the individual who experiences the stressor.

Of particular interest to social support theorists are the differences that men and women appear to exhibit in relation to the availability and utilization of social support. Men are less likely than women to report having a close confidant and are more likely to list their spouse (as opposed to someone else) as a confidant (Antonucci, 1987). Men's social relationships emphasize the performance of tasks while women's center around intimacy and disclosure with a much greater network of family or friends (Antonucci, 1987; Buhrke, 1987), and men tend to score lower on measures of perceived emotional and informational support (Krohne & Slangen, 2005). These ideas may explain why men appear to derive greater support benefit from marriage than women in studies of mortality risk (Berkman & Syme, 1979; House et al., 1982; Kaplan, Salonen, Cohen, Brand, Syme, & Puska, 1988).

Men's more limited reliance on their spouse as a source of social support may be related to the way they are conditioned by society according to normative behavior and stereotypes that prescribe limits on supportive activities of male-male friendships (Pleck, 1981; Rubin, 1983). For example, according to societal dictates, men are supposed to be superior, independent, and self reliant, and more powerful than others (Brannon, 1976). In this sense, social support in itself is inimical to the way that men are conditioned to view their gender identity, and it's likely that the most potent effects of social support with men are observed only within single male-female relationships where men have social "permission" to receive support.

Of particular interest in view of the stress-buffering hypothesis of social support is the conceptualization of gender role conflict, which has been defined as a psychological state in which sex roles have negative consequences or impacts on the person or on others (O'Neil, 1981). Four constructs within gender role conflict have been identified including Success, Power, and Competition (SPC); Restrictive Emotionality (RE); Restrictive and Affectionate Behavior Between Men (RABBM); and Conflict Between Work and Family Relations (CBWFR) (O'Neil et al., 1986). Gender role conflict occurs when gender roles prescribe limitations on value systems and behaviors of men and has been implicated in a number of important health and psychological outcomes including men's reluctance to seek psychological help (G.E. Good et al., 1989), lower self-esteem (Cournoyer, 1995), higher depression and anxiety (Cournoyer, 1995; Sharpe & Heppner, 1991), psychological distress (Liu et al., 2005), and less capacity for intimacy (Cournoyer, 1995; Mahalik, Locke, Theodore, Cornoyer, & Floyd, 2001).

Recognizing that men's social support likely comes from a narrow range of sources and often from a single partner (Fuhrer & Stansfeld, 2002), the relationship between gender role conflict and decreased capacity for intimacy suggests deficits in social support among men may be explained by sex role socialization. Conceptual definitions of the gender role conflict constructs imply that overall negative associations should be expected given a traditional understanding of the various meanings of social support. Specifically, social support can be thought of as the functional content of relationships, which includes the provision of love, empathy, tangible assistance, advice, affirmation, and constructive feedback (Heaney, 2002). Success, Power, and Competition may limit supportive interactions within relationships if men experience constant focus on upward career mobility, obtaining authority over others, and comparison with others to establish superiority. Likewise, if men are limited in their emotional expressions to others, Restrictive Emotionality could negatively relate to social support by limiting the reciprocity necessary in supporting relationships. Expressions of Restrictive and Affectionate Behavior Between Men may work to limit the size of the social network from which men may experience supportive relationships, and Conflicts Between Work and Family Relations may exacerbate stressors and life disruptions, preempting adequate conditions for support to occur.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between gender role conflict and the perception of the availability of multidimensional social support in a sample of older males. Specifically, we hypothesized that men who exhibit greater gender role conflict will report less perceived availability of social support. In addition, based on the strength of previous research and the knowledge that most men derive their support from limited sources, we suggest that restrictive emotionality will have the greatest impact on perceived social support.

METHODS

SAMPLE AND DATA COLLECTION

The sample for this study was obtained from an alumni list of a large northwestern United States university, and two methods were used to select men for invitation to the study. In the first, a 50% random sample (n = 733) of men with available electronic mail addresses was selected to receive an electronic invitation to participate in the survey on-line. Second, a traditional paper/pencil survey was sent to 675 randomly selected (sampling frame 12,200) male alumni who did not have an electronic address available.

For the electronic survey, an electronic letter was sent out inviting the men to participate in a survey addressing men's health issues. Incorrect email addresses accounted for 159 of the 733 invitations, and four men sent emails back declining to participate in the study. Additionally, a number of men sent messages back agreeing to participate but expressing displeasure at having been contacted by means of unsolicited electronic mailings. For this reason, the planned follow-up that included reminder electronic messages was omitted, and the final response included 147 completed surveys (26%).

For the paper-and-pencil survey, the 675 invitations were sent out, followed by two successive reminder postcards spaced three weeks apart. Surveys were originally labeled with a numbering system so that those who responded would not be recontacted with reminder postcards. Incorrect mailing addresses accounted for 38 of the 675 invitations, and 256 completed surveys were returned by the end of the study period for a response rate of 40%.

The study sample consisted of male university alumni aged 40 and over who agreed to participate in the research. The mean age of study participants at the time of the study was 53 years (SD = 9.07) and ranged from 40 to 86 years. Participants were white (93%), married or a member of a couple (85%), and currently employed (78%). Based upon our locus on older men, it was expected that we would see a significant number of men who were retired, though only 17% of the sample identified so. Educational status and income were also anticipated to be high given the nature of the sample (i.e., college graduates). Forty-seven percent of the sample had bachelor's degrees, 32% held master's, and 21% were educated at the doctoral level. Income was generally high with almost 81% reporting earning greater than $50,000 annually.

MEASURES

The Gender Role Conflict Scale (GRCS) (O'Neil et al., 1986) is a 37-item instrument designed to measure the extent to which men experience negative consequences or impacts from the male gender role. More specifically, men are asked to report the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with 37 statements concerning gender role behaviors and feelings on Likert-type scales ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). Four subscale scores were calculated for each subject including (a) success, power, and competition (SPC); (b) restrictive emotionality (RE); (c) restrictive affectionate behavior between men (RABM); and (d) conflicts between work and family relations (CBWL).

Original internal consistency scores using Cronbach's alpha ranged from .75 to .85 for each subscale for a sample of college-age men and have since been replicated in numerous other studies. Average reliabilities from 11 studies using the GRCS ranged from .81 to .90 (O'Neil & Owen, 1994), and reliability coefficients for this study for the four subscales of gender role conflict were (a) success, power, and competition (.86); (b) restrictive emotionality (.87); (c) restrictive and affectionate behavior between men (.89); and (d) conflicts between work and family relations (.86).

Validity of the GRCS with younger men has been established for some time (Good et al., 1995; Rogers et al., 1997) and was tested in the current sample of older men through confirmatory factor analysis and found comparable to previous work (Hill, 2004).

The Medical Outcomes Study Social Support Survey is a 19-item instrument designed to measure the perceived availability of four types of social support: (a) emotional/informational support, (b) tangible support, (c) affectionate support, and (d) positive social interaction (Sherbourne & Stewart, 1991). Participants were asked to rate how often certain types of support are available to them using a five-point Likert-type scale (1 = none of the time, 5 = all of the time). The original study reported internal consistency coefficients ranging from .91 (affective support) to .96 (emotional/informational support), with a total scale reliability reported at .97. For this study, subscale reliability coefficients included (a) emotional/informational support (.95); (b) affectionate support (.90); (c) tangible support (.91); and (d) positive social interaction (.90). The internal consistency coefficient for overall social support was .96.

RESULTS

DATA PREPARATION AND PROCEDURE FOR ANALYSIS

All data analysis was conducted through SPSS Base 11.5 (for Windows, SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL) and began with 403 cases. After deleting 14 cases with missing data exceeding 10%, 389 cases were available for analysis. Seventy-three cases contained between one and three missing data points (65 possible data points) and were screened through the SPSS missing-value routine to investigate both individual and pairwise patterns. No patterns were found, and no variable had greater than 2% occurrence of missing values. An expectation-maximization procedure was utilized to impute missing values for the incomplete 73 cases.

Following the imputation of missing values, standardized scores for individual variables were used to determine that there were not univariate outliers. Frequency distributions for each subscale score of the GRCS and the total social support score from the MOS Social Support Survey indicated that skewness and kurtosis were not problems in this data set.

T-tests on individual items and type of survey method (web-based or paper/pencil) were examined to conclude that there was no difference in response based solely upon how the survey was conducted. Following data preparation and screening, canonical correlation was used to explore which of the four dimensions of social support relate most strongly with the tour dimensions of gender role conflict.

Means and standard deviations for continuous variables are shown in Table 1. Higher scores on the GRCS indicate more gender role conflict specific to each subscale, and higher scores on the MOS Social Support Scale indicate more perceived social support.

Results of the canonical correlation are found in Table 2 and show the relationships among all of the dimensions for both gender role conflict and social support. Variables in set 1 include the subscale scores of SPC, RE, RABM, and CBWL from the GRCS. Variables in set 2 include the subscale scores from the MOS Social Support Survey of emotional/informational support, affectionate support, tangible support, and positive social interaction.

The first canonical variate accounted for 18% of the overlapping variance and had canonical correlation of .423. The second canonical correlation failed to reach statistical significance (p = .071) and accounted for only 3% of overlapping variance between the two sets of variables. Canonical variate 1 appeared strongly influenced by SPC, RE, and RABM and was inversely related to emotional/informational support, affectionate support, and positive social interaction. Those subjects who scored high on SPC, RE, and RAMB tended to score lower on emotional/informational support, affectionate support, and positive social interaction. This inverse relationship was especially true between restrictive emotionality on the gender role conflict side and the perception of emotional/informational support on the social support side.

DISCUSSION

The canonical correlation analysis indicated that 18% of the shared variance between the four subscales of gender role conflict and the four dimensions of social support was explained. This analysis fell short, however, in describing any multiple dimensions along which these variables were related and determined that there was only a single canonical variate that was both interpretable and practically relevant. Within this variate, all four subscales of gender role conflict on one side appear to be inversely related to emotional/informational support, affectionate support, and positive social interaction.

Particularly relevant from a theoretical sense is that the highest canonical loading for the gender role conflict variables was restrictive emotionality (.955) and the highest loading for the social support variables was emotional/informational support (-.898). This finding is consistent with others (Sharpe & Heppner, 1991) who found a similar inverse pattern of canonical loadings with respect to the gender role conflict subscale of restrictive emotionality and the Miller Social Intimacy Scale among a sample of college-age men.

These results also agree with those of previous research (Mahalik et al., 2001) with middle aged (36-45) men where restrictive emotionality was associated with costs to social intimacy. However, these findings add to previous work in that our sample was on average 12 years older and men in our study ranged to as old as 86 years. The fact that our findings are consistent with previous research with respect to the persistent impact of restrictive emotionality on the lives of men (Cournoyer, 1995; Theodore & Lloyd, 2000) questions the developmental stage theory as previously noted (Mahalik et al., 2001), which suggests as men age they begin to move away from restrictive notions of masculinity (O'Neil & Egan, 1992). Restrictive emotionality within men appears to relate to social processes across the life span, and this relationship may represent a potent predictor in the gender gap of social support and health.

These findings also add to previous work since we examined multidimensional social support whereby specific aspects of the social benefits of relationships could be examined instead of unidimensional views of social processes such as social intimacy. Though we did not find multiple interpretable dimensions along which gender role conflict and social support were related, there is evidence that emotional support, affectionate support, and positive social interactions all relate to gender role conflict. Lack of findings for impacts of tangible support may be related to the nature of our college-educated and older sample with relatively high socioeconomic status or the possibility that tangible support is not affected by traditional norms of male behavior.

Several limitations exist in this study, suggesting a tentative conclusion. First, response rates for our survey were relatively low, suggesting that those men who returned the survey may not represent the population as a whole. Second, by virtue of the cross-sectional nature of this study, effects observed may he related to cohort effects or localized societal effects that would not be generalizable to all older men. Third, our sample is limited to upper-class, educated, white males. Because gender role expectations may be dynamic across age and culture, these results should not be generalized outside of this population. We did not gather data on the potential sources of social support in this sample. Although our analysis was based on the amount of perceived social support within older males, we cannot speculate on the impact of gender role conflict on single or multiple sources of social support within a social network.

Despite the limitations, this research underscores the need to examine gender roles issues in relation social support as a powerful mediator of health in men. It provides evidence that gender role conflict is related to how men perceive the availability of social support within the context of their lives. Future research should replicate these results in a more heterogeneous sample of men and attempt to validate the relationship of gender role conflict and social support on health behavior or health outcome data. Furthermore, subsequent inquiry should address how gender role conflict impacts specific sources of social support. For example, which elements of gender role conflict appear to have the greatest effects on multidimensional social support derived from differing sources (e.g., male friends, female friends, spouse or "significant other")? Are these relationships consistent across the life span? Answers to these questions may explain the differential health effects of marriage on men as well as provide clues for disease prevention and health promotion practitioners.

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The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Northwest Health Foundation for conducting this research.

Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Wade Hill, PhD, APRN, BC, 207 Sherrick Hall, Montana State University-College of Nursing, Bozeman, MT 59717. Electronic mail: [e-mail].

WADE G. HILL

Montana State University

Bozeman, MT

REBECCA J. DONATELLE

Oregon State University

Corvallis, OR

Table 1

Means and Standard Deviations for Continuous Variables (N 389)

Variable                        Mean    SD

Age                             53.2    9.1
Gender role conflict
  SPC                           44.0   10.2
  RE                            31.8    9.5
  CBWL                          21.1    6.7
Social support
  Emotional/informational       30.4    7.0
  Affectionate                  16.8    3.5
  Tangible                      12.6    2.8
  Positive social interaction   12.1    2.5
  Total support                 71.9   14.0

Table 2

Canonical Correlation Analysis for Predictor Variables of
Gender Role Conflict (Set 1) and Multidimensional
Social Support (Set 2) (N=389)

Variable sets                    Canonical variate 1

Predictor set 1
  SPC                                    .70
  RE                                     .96
  RABM                                   .70
  CBWL                                   .41
Predictor set 2
  Emotional/informational               -.90
  Affectionate                          -.74
  Tangible                              -.30
Positive social interaction             -.74
  Canonical correlation                  .42
  Explained variance                      18%

Note: Cutoff for interpretation is. 30.