The preceding chapters have demonstrated the value in attending to communication processes to understand when and why close relational partners will evaluate enacted social support as helpful, supportive, and sensitive. This is important for understanding social support and its effects on coping as well as for understanding the conduct of close relationships. Participants' interpretations and positive evaluations of troubles talk conversations are a key link in the processes that enable individuals to cope more effectively with stressors and sustain satisfying relationships.

The social support that is enacted in the troubles talk conversations of close relational partners is socially situated, meaningful, and rhetorical activity. This helps explain why previous research focused on the sheer frequency or amount of social support a person reports has seldom yielded consistent or powerful effects. Although most researchers agree that enacted social support is conceptually different from social network structures, social integration, or the perceived availability of support, we have not always fully recognized one of the implications of this distinction; namely, that the ways we have conceptualized and measured other facets of support may not be the most useful ways to study enacted support. In this book I have proposed that, because enacted social support is a communicative phenomenon, it is useful to study it with a set of assumptions, concepts, and methods that are suited to capturing communicative processes and their associations with participants' evaluations of support.