Higher Vocational Students Social Support: For Support And Support The Relationship And Interaction

Vocational college students have been a focused group and have had been a hot topic in the fields of sociology and psychology. The research of their social support has not, however, got enough attention. This study probed into the relationship and interaction between vocational college students’receiving support and providing support, employing the methods of sampling and interviewing.With the questionnaires of Reciprocal and Balanced Support Scales, Perceived Received Support Scale, Perceived Provided Support Scale, and the gratitude&indebtedness scenarios and the high-cost&low-cost vignettes,316vocational college students, randomly selected from3different colleges of Nanjing, were tested and280valid questionnaires were returned.To know deeply the characteristics and interactions between vocational college students’receiving and providing support, the interview method was adopted to clarify the results from the questionnaire survey research and to discuss the related issues. Semi-structure interviews were conducted with13vocational college students, and for each respondent there was a2hour interview. With each interviewee’s permission, a tape-recording facility was used in each conversation. After interviews, all tape-recorded sound was transcribed into texts which were then processed through the procedures of reading, explaining, landing, coding, categorizing, analyzing and writing. And the main conclusions are drawn as follows:(1) The relationship between vocational college students’receiving and providing support is of unbalance in content and of balance in form.(2) The balanced styles vary in all kinds of interpersonal relations in society. The No-return pattern is existed in family, and the reciprocity is stressed during peers and for teachers, we have to considerate the return. These suggest that the variable, the social relation, can influence the degree of balance of the two.(3) The balanced types also differ in instrument support and in emotion or companionship support, respectively showing characteristics of direct-balance and indirect-balance. These indicate that the variable, the type of social support, can make a significance on the levels of balance of the two.(4) When the aid elicits recipients’positive gratitude toward their benefactors, there has equity in the relationship between them, which makes recipients principledly provide returns to their benefactors. When the aid arouses recipients’negative indebtedness toward their helpers, there has inequity in the relationship between them, which obliges recipients unprincipledly to return to their helpers. These imply that gratitude and indebtedness can effectively influence the mechanism of receiving support functioning to providing support.(5) These main factors affect the mechanism of providing support functioning to receiving support include costs of providing support and social moralities in obligation-based return (a type of recipients being compelled to maintain their balance of supports), discrepancies between recipients’and helpers’weight on each other’s provided supports in option-based return (a type of recipients being not required to return and being depended on recipients’will), convictions of words(one who helps others is eventually being helped) in wish-based return (a type of one knowing that he or she can receive help when he or she needs), and self-values in satisfaction-based return (a type of contenting oneself with others" rewards).