Brief Articles
The Impact of Gender Role Conflict
on Multidimensional Social Support
in Older Men
WADE G. HILL
Montana State University
Bozeman, MT
REBECCA J. DONATELLE
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR
This study examines the impact of gender role conflict on the perceived social support in a sample of older men aged 40-86. Threehundred 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
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:
[email protected].
International Journal of Men’s Health, Vol. 4, No. 3, Fall 2005, 267-276.
© 2005 by the Men’s Studies Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
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HILL and DONATELLE
T
he 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
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THE IMPACT OF GENDER ROLE CONFLICT
potent effects of social support with men are observed only within single malefemale 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.
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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 focus 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
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THE IMPACT OF GENDER ROLE CONFLICT
(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
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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 four 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.
Table 1
Means and Standard Deviations for Continuous Variables (N=389)
Variable
Age
Gender role conflict
SPC
RE
CBWL
Social support
Emotional/informational
Affectionate
Tangible
Positive social interaction
Total support
Mean
SD
53.2
9.1
44.0
31.8
21.1
10.2
9.5
6.7
30.4
16.8
12.6
12.1
71.9
7.0
3.5
2.8
2.5
14.0
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.
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THE IMPACT OF GENDER ROLE CONFLICT
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
RE
RABM
CBWL
Predictor set 2
Emotional/informational
Affectionate
Tangible
Positive social interaction
Canonical correlation
Explained variance
.70
.96
.70
.41
-.90
-.74
-.30
-.74
.42
18%
Note: Cutoff for interpretation is .30.
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 previ273
HILL and DONATELLE
ously 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 be 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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