Karyssa Lowe and Landen Sawejka, “Support-Seeking Strategies during Supportive Conversations between Friends”
Mentor: Lucas Youngvorst, Communication, Letters & Science (College of)
Oral Presentation: 9:15am Union E220
Support-seeking strategies play a crucial role in shaping the effectiveness and outcomes of supportive conversations. Effective support-seeking can strengthen relationships and improve emotional well-being, while ineffective strategies may lead to increased stress or relational turmoil. This project is part of a larger study that aims to evaluate how different support-seeking strategies influence communicative behaviors and conversational outcomes between friends. The goal of this project is to generate the data necessary to statistically test the relationships between support-seeking strategies and conversational success. To achieve this, we employed a quantitative content analysis using a detailed codebook to code transcripts of supportive conversations between friends. The coding process involved the initial creation of the codebook and a training phase to establish inter-rater reliability, followed by independent coding of 20 transcripts per week over a seven-week period. Results showed that direct emotion-focused support-seeking strategies (e.g., disclosing feelings, seeking emotional reassurance) were most common, followed by direct problem-focused strategies (e.g., explaining the problem, asking for advice), avoidant problem-focused strategies (e.g., downplaying the problem, avoid detailing the problem), and avoidant emotion-focused strategies (e.g., suppressing emotional experience, seeking emotional distraction), respectively. Preliminary analyses suggest that direct emotion-focused support-seeking strategies were positively correlated with higher levels of conversational satisfaction and more supportive responses from conversation partners. Conversely, avoidant strategies were less effective in eliciting supportive responses. These findings suggest that clarity and directness in support-seeking may lead to more effective and fulfilling interpersonal relationships and interaction. This study provides valuable insights into the dynamics of supportive communication and sets the stage for future research exploring the causal mechanisms behind these interactions. Understanding how different support-seeking strategies impact conversational outcomes has important implications for improving interpersonal supportive communication.