Job stressors and social support seeking: A sensing-based longitudinal panel study

Since decades, stress researchers have considered social support as a key resource for preventing or coping with job stress. Furthermore, social support is seen as a direct contributor or precondition to wellbeing and subjective health (Danna & Griffin, 1999). Whereas the job stress literature has spent a substantial focus on the supposed moderator role of social support (the buffer hypothesis) or its direct effects on wellbeing, the stressor-support effect has gained much less attention. In addition, the focus was on receiving social support and less on the individual’s effort to seek social support that underlies the stressor-support effect. From such a perspective, job stressors prompt social support seeking as a coping strategy in attempt to either cope with the stressor or the emotional stress response. The intended research project attempts to investigate the effect of job stressors on social support seeking, measured in a longitudinal triangulation study in which perceived job stressors are measured with self-reports and social support seeking is measured by relying on smartphone-based sensing data (i.e., Bluetooth-based interactions, the number of outgoing telephone calls, their duration, and the number of outgoing text massages). The longitudinal design comprises 6 months of monthly measured job stressors (workload and role ambiguity) and monthly aggregated sensing data. In addition, exploratory analyses will focus on the shape of individual daily time series, their relationship with job stressors, and inter-individual differences in the shape and relationship.