SOCIAL SUPPORT MESSAGES AND THE MANAGEMENT OF UNCERTAINTY IN THE EXPERIENCE OF BREAST-CANCER - AN APPLICATION OF PROBLEMATIC INTEGRATION-THEORY

This article synthesizes past studies of illness, stress, coping, and social support and offers a model of communicative support, based on P roblematic integration theory, that emphasizes two major dimensions of meaning in the breast cancer experience. The model suggests that supp ortive messages are designed to help the breast cancer patient manage both Perceptions of the likelihood (e.g., uncertainty) of various illn ess experiences and evaluations of those experiences. Support messages are designed to facilitate coping by reducing, maintaining, or increa sing the supportee's level of uncertainty; variations in message desig n are expected to be related to perceptions of the supportee's pre-mes sage uncertainty about and evaluation of the potential experience. The se expectations were tested by asking breast cancer patients to formul ate supportive messages in response to several hypothetical scenarios. The same patients were then asked to judge the likely function of the ir messages. These judgments were assessed by means of loglinear analy sis. The results generally support the model of social support suggest ed by problematic integration theory.