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Social support refers to “an exchange of resources between two individuals perceived by the provider or the recipient to be intended to enhance the well-being of the recipient” (Shumaker & Brownell, 1984). This interchange includes the direct and the buffering effect. The former can improve an individual’s physical and mental health by immersing individuals in an environment full of positive emotion. The latter can ease emotional pressure by providing resources and assistance to help enhance an individual’s confidence and ability to cope with issues. Traditional applications of social support focus on exploring linkages between specific health treatments and the support provided by people around patients in real life settings (e.g., Kroenke et al., 2013; Lu & Hsu, 2013). They examined the relationships between social mechanisms and the life quality of patients, and reported that larger social networks and greater social support were related to better life quality and disease recovery. However, with the increasing use of Social Network Sites (SNS), such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, they are changing people’s social lives and the ways they interact with others. Hundreds of millions of people access SNS as one of their daily activities to maintain existing social relationships and make new friends.
Although scholars reported the dark sides of SNS, such as cyberbullying, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, fake news, stress, social comparison, and privacy abuse (e.g., Fox & Moreland, 2015; Baccarella et al., 2018), the trend of using SNS is unstoppable. Nevertheless, how people obtain social support from SNS is still mysterious. Recent research has mentioned that users might obtain social support from SNS (Lee, Noh & Koo, 2013; Oh, Ozkaya & LaRose, 2014; Lee, Chung & Park, 2015). For example, Lee, Noh and Koo (2013) studied Korean Facebook users and reported that self-disclosure positively affects social support, and social support positively affects well-being. These studies regarded social support as a standalone variable and have not examined the types of social support people perceive in a cyberspace setting. Traditional social support scholars (such as Thoits, 1982; Shumaker & Brownell, 1984; Langford et al., 1997) considered social support as a multi-dimensional variable. In this study, the authors believe that studying social support in a multi-dimensional view can explore human behavior in depth in the virtual world. Also it will be helpful for SNS companies to improve their systems to increase people’s well-being.
Although few recent studies have mentioned some factors positively influencing the perceived social support, such as active Facebook use (Frison & Eggermont, 2016), authentic self-presentation (Wang et al., 2019) and demographic features (Mishra & Saranath, 2019), there is a need to theoretically explore the antecedents affecting the perceived social support in depth. A study by Mishra and Saranath (2019) reported that personal traits like age, marital status, family income and education affects the perceived social support and further leads mental adjustment to breast cancer patients. Their results enlightened the research question of this study: why and in what conditions people can sense social support in SNS. Similarity-Attraction theory (Kaptein et al., 2014) claims that individuals are more attracted to those who are similar to them in terms of gender, growing background, personal traits, values and socio-economic conditions. That is to say, people with high similarity are easier to become significant others and then we are easier to perceive their social support. Therefore, this study applies supplementary fit based on similarity of Person-Environment (P-E) fit to answer the research question. Supplementary fit refers to similar or matching characteristics between a person and other group members (Cable & Edwards, 2004). It occurs when “a person supplements, embellishes, or possesses characteristics which are similar to other individuals in the environment” (Muchinsky & Monahan, 1987, p.269). From this point of view, we assume that individuals perceive greater social support when supplementary fit occurs between the individual and other users in SNS.