The Nature of Supportive Listening, I: Exploring the Relation between ...

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The Nature of Supportive Listening, I: Exploring the Relation between Supportive Listeners and Supportive People a

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Graham D. Bodie , Andrea J. Vickery & Christopher C. Gearhart

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Department of Communication Studies, The Louisiana State University Version of record first published: 19 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Graham D. Bodie, Andrea J. Vickery & Christopher C. Gearhart (2013): The Nature of Supportive Listening, I: Exploring the Relation between Supportive Listeners and Supportive People, International Journal of Listening, 27:1, 39-49 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2013.732408

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The Intl. Journal of Listening, 27: 39–49, 2013 Copyright © International Listening Association ISSN: 1090-4018 print / 1932-586X online DOI: 10.1080/10904018.2013.732408

The Nature of Supportive Listening, I: Exploring the Relation between Supportive Listeners and Supportive People Graham D. Bodie, Andrea J. Vickery, and Christopher C. Gearhart Department of Communication Studies The Louisiana State University

Supportive listening is recognized as an important element of supportive interactions, yet there is little research on the specific behaviors and characteristics of supportive listeners. Moreover, the terms supportive person and supportive listener are used interchangeably. This study sought 1) to investigate how supportive people and supportive listeners are described and 2) to assess similarities and differences among these categories. To answer our research questions, one group (n = 206) described unsupportive/supportive persons, and a second group (n = 211) described unsupportive/supportive listeners. Thought units from these data were then categorized and compared for similarities between these two types of supportive individuals. Results indicate supportive individuals, both listeners and persons, were described similarly, though several notable differences were identified. In general, the label supportive listening may be best described as a set of behavioral responses, whereas the term supportive person seems to represent a broader, overarching cognitive category used to organize various behaviors which include listening.

When faced with difficult circumstances, we are naturally drawn to confide in others (Rime, Corsini, & Herbette, 2002). More times than not, our disclosures elicit the provision of emotional support, those “[specific] lines of communicative behavior enacted by one party with the intent of helping another cope effectively with emotional distress” (Burleson, 2003, p. 552). The crux of this definition is “intent,” as support from others can buffer the negative impact of stressful events (Cohen & McKay, 1984), but it does not always help and can often make things worse (Bodie, 2011b; Dunkel-Schetter, Blasband, Feinstein, & Herbert, 1992). Topping lists of desired emotionally supportive behavior is the presence of a close other who “listens” in times of need (for review see Goldsmith, 2004, p. 21). Of course, just like other forms of communication, listening behaviors can be employed more or less effectively (Brownell, 2010). It is not surprising, then, that individuals experiencing a range of life stressors (e.g., cancer, bereavement, everyday stressors) commonly mention the lack of “listening” as unhelpful emotional support (see Bodie, 2012).

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Graham D. Bodie, Department of Communication Studies, The Louisiana State University, 136 Coates Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. E-mail: [email protected]


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BODIE, VICKERY, AND GEARHART

Although the role of listening in helping situations has been recognized for decades, we unfortunately know little about what constitutes actual supportive listening (Jones, 2011). To the extent that supportive listening is a key component of effective emotional support it makes good sense to investigate the specific attributes and behaviors that constitute and, perhaps, distinguish supportive listening from related concepts. One related concept that has been explored is relational listening (Halone & Pecchioni, 2001) and the micro- and macro-level attributes and behaviors associated with listeners in various types of relationships (e.g., friends, romantic partners, relatives) (Pecchioni & Halone, 2000). Individuals may seek support from a variety of individuals, and the attributes of a specific relational partner may or may not be similar to the desired attributes of a supportive listener. The nature of supportive listening (e.g., what makes it helpful or harmful) remains vague, and this vagueness thwarts efforts to build theory (Bodie, 2009) as well as efforts to train this important skill (Janusik, 2010). Another form of listening theorized as related to emotional support is active-empathic listening (AEL). Active-empathic listening reflects a listener’s affinity to actively attend to the messages of others with the goal of understanding their underlying emotional states (Bodie, 2011a; Drollinger, Comer, & Warrington, 2006). AEL is most readily associated with skills that enable one to be an efficient and effective conversational partner (Gearhart & Bodie, 2011). However, the adaptation of active-empathic listeners seems particularly salient in contexts where conversations turn to emotional matters (e.g., supportive interactions; Jones, 2011). If we should classify types of listening such as AEL as supportive listening, and if it is a skill that is repeatable upon situational demand, then it is important to understand the specific, observable behaviors associated with the AEL skill set. While behaviors such as eye contact, facial affect, and smiling have been considered to be those that reflect listening in general (Bodie, St. Cyr, Pence, Rold, & Honeycutt, 2012), these researchers also determined that “future research should explore . . . the myriad behaviors touted as necessary to be seen as a good listener” (p. 26). Thus, we ask the following research question as an initial effort to unpack how supportive and unsupportive listening are described. RQ1: How do individuals describe supportive and unsupportive listeners?

Adding to the complexity of our task, the extant literature often conflates the terms supportive listener and supportive person, making them seemingly isomorphic. For example, Jones and Guerrero (2001) claim that supportive people are those who “show that they are listening to the distressed person” (p. 568). One way to show you are listening is to enact various nonverbal behaviors known as immediacy cues (Andersen & Andersen, 2005). As Bodie and Jones (2012) reported recently, however, these behaviors account for only a small amount of variance in evaluations of others as supportive listeners thus opening the door for the study of additional behaviors and how they might contribute to impressions of helpers as good (or bad) listeners. Previous research has provided a general understanding of the broad characteristics of supportive people. In general, the scholarly literature seems to suggest that supportive people possess (a) the ability to acquire knowledge about the feelings and emotional states of others; (b) knowledge about human emotion and its dynamics; and (c) knowledge of specific nonverbal, linguistic, and rhetorical resources through which supportive interactions can be realized in specific message strategies (Burleson & Kunkel, 1996). In addition, supportive people are described as having a high level of motivation—a desire and willingness—to provide comfort to those in need (Burleson, Holmstrom, & Gilstrap, 2005). While developed separately from Halone and Pecchioni’s (2001; Pecchioni & Halone, 2000) examination of relational listening,


SUPPORTIVE LISTENING

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characteristics of listeners mirror these general characteristics: listeners “get the meaning” of their relational partners; as part of recognizing their knowledge, they “attend to verbal cues” and “offer feedback,” and “make a conscious effort” expressing a “willingness” to listen to their relational partner (see also Halone, Cunconan, Coakley, & Wolvin, 1998). These apparent similarities between supportive people and relational listening prompts the need for further investigation into the nature of supportive people and supportive listeners. We suggest that one way to disentangle supportive people and supportive listeners, thereby making a conceptual space for each, is to compare descriptions of supportive listeners with descriptions of supportive people. Through this comparison we will gain additional insight into particular attributes and behaviors that define supportive listening, making clear conceptual delineations for scholars and practitioners alike. Thus, we pose the following research question: RQ2: How do descriptions of (un)supportive listeners compare to descriptions of (un)supportive people?

The theoretical goals of this article are situated within the larger conceptual and methodological framework of constructivism (Burleson & Bodie, 2008), which suggests that individual mental representations of the social world drive how we act and react to its substance. In other words, how we think about something (e.g., how we conceptualize supportive listening) influences how we act in relevant situations (e.g., how we evaluate people as supportive listeners). The importance of understanding mental representations of various types of listening was recently highlighted by Bodie et al. (2012) who stated: “When forming impressions of others one internal source influencing judgments is the implicit theory of listening subscribed to by the individual observer” (p. 2). We hope to extend this line of thinking by helping to understand the content of mental representations of “supportive people” and “supportive listening” and how these representations overlap and diverge. In addition, we hope to provide helpful advice for everyday support providers and the practitioners who educate them by discovering specific behaviors and actions people seek or expect from support providers and listeners. Currently, when scholars make recommendations to helpers about how to be supportive, suggestions often reflect the need to “listen effectively” without specifying exactly what that means (e.g., Burleson, 2007; MacGeorge, Feng, & Thompson, 2008). When specific recommendations are made (e.g., in textbooks), those recommendations are often not derived from empirical research and could consequently lead to teaching ineffective or potentially harmful strategies (Bodie, 2010). Thus, our study might be best considered an attempt to make our ideas about supportive listening more clear (Peirce, 1878), paving the way for explicit and useful theories of how people evaluate others as supportive listeners.

METHOD Participants The total sample consisted of 417 undergraduate participants (62% female) enrolled in Communication Studies courses at Louisiana State University. The mean age of this mostly Caucasian (n = 337) sample was 20.03 (SD = 2.65). All class ranks were represented (111 freshmen, 134 sophomores, 80 juniors, 83 seniors) as were 13 of 16 academic programs.

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Procedure Students choosing to participate in this study were randomly assigned to one of two versions of an online survey. The first version (n = 211) asked participants to think of and describe both a supportive and unsupportive listener, whereas the second version (n = 206) asked participants to think of and describe both a supportive and unsupportive person. After typing their descriptions, participants provided basic demographic information as well as other measures not germane to the present study. All procedures were followed to comply with the appropriate university Institutional Review Board protocol.

Data Analysis The locus of analysis for this study is the thought unit (see Stafford, Burggraf, & Sharkey, 1987), which was determined by the first and third authors (U < .05). To develop the final codebook for grouping thought units into meaningful categories, our research team followed the nine step process illustrated in Figure 1. To begin, the third author and an additional advanced graduate student blind to the study goals each conducted a separate indicative thematic analysis (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007) of the supportive/unsupportive listening responses. Second, those individual analyses were compared and discussed during a meeting with the first author of this manuscript. Overall, thematic maps were similar, and differences were primarily semantic.1 Third, substantive differences (e.g., coding a response into different categories) were resolved through discussion amongst both graduate students and the first author, which resulted in an initial coding rubric. Fourth, to verify the integrity of the initial rubric, the second author of this manuscript viewed the data for the first time and conducted an independent thematic analysis on the supportive and unsupportive listening responses using the initial coding rubric. There was 100% agreement between the second author’s thematic analysis and the original coding of the supportive and unsupportive listener responses. Fifth, the second author of this manuscript then used the initial rubric to conduct a thematic analysis of the supportive and unsupportive person responses. Although most of the themes from the initial rubric appeared in those data, there were substantially more responses unable to be coded in the supportive/unsupportive person data. To resolve the issue of uncodable responses from the supportive/unsupportive person data, the responses were read by the second author to investigate the existence of new emergent themes. The new emergent themes were discussed with the first author, resulting in us adding six themes to the initial rubric. The eighth step consisted of the first and second authors individually rereading and discussing the responses from participants describing the supportive/unsupportive listener originally unable to be coded and found that 26% of those originally uncodable responses could fit into one of our new categories. The final rubric with descriptions of all substantive themes and example responses is included in Table 1.

1 For

example, while one coder labeled responses like “lives a holy life” as “faith/beliefs,” the other labeled similar responses as “religion/spirituality.”


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Indicative thematic analysis of supportive listening responses by third author and an independent coder blind of study goals

Discussion of individual themes with first author

Initial coding rubric solidified

Independent coding by second author of supportive/unsupportive listening responses

Use of initial rubric to code supportive/unsupportive person responses

Uncodable supportive/unsupportive person responses read and re-read by second author to develop additional themes

New themes discussed amongst first and second authors

Second author returned to uncodable responses from supportive/unsupportive listener prompt to attempt coding with new themes

Final rubric settled FIGURE 1 Visual depiction of the coding process.

RESULTS There were a total of 5,533 thought units (unsupportive listener, n = 1,885; supportive listener, n = 1,212; unsupportive person, n = 1,348; supportive person, n = 1,088). Some of these thought units were considered tautological given participant instructions. For instance, when describing the supportive listener a few students wrote comments such as “She is a good listener” (n = 71;

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TABLE 1 Supportive Listener/Person Categories, Description and Example Thought Units Category


1. Self/Other Focused 2. Understanding/ Open-Mindedness 3. Honesty/Trust

4. Intelligence/ Competence 5. Friendly/Sociable 6. Involvement/Interest 7. Verbal Responsiveness 8. Nonverbal Behavior 9. Signals Similarity 10. Faith & Beliefs 11. Listening

Description Statements signaling a person’s tendency to focus on others or self Statements about a person’s understanding and common behaviors about judgment Statements describing a person as trustworthy, honest, discrete with secrets Statements that reflect a demonstration of a person’s intelligence or character Statements about how friendly, likable, sociable, extroverted a person is Statements indicating involvement, interest, or activity in a conversation Statements about verbal feedback during a conversation Observations of the person’s nonverbal behavior while conversing Statements that observe shared commonalities Statements describing the religiosity of the person

15. Encourages/ Motivates∗

Statements describing how skillfully or effectively the person listens in interactions with others. Statements relating to the optimistic/pessimistic orientation of the person General descriptive statements about a person’s physical characteristics Statements describing the inactivity or activity of a person Statements about the ability or desire of person to motivate respondent

16. Self Esteem/ Confidence∗ 17. Loud/Dramatic ∗

Statements describing a person’s magnitude of confidence/self-esteem Statements describing a person as loud/dramatic

12. Positive/Negative∗ 13. Demographics∗ 14. Lazy/not Lazy∗

Example Thought Units “puts others before self” “only cares about themselves” “non judgmental” “tells the truth no matter if it’s good or bad” “tells others your secrets” “responsible” “not very smart” “has lots of friends” “nobody likes her” “doesn’t interrupt” “looking at their phone” “gives input” “doesn’t ask questions” “uses gestures” “doesn’t make eye contact” “shares my values” “lives a holy life” “not Christian” “knows how to listen” “does not listen very well” “very positive” “a pessimistic person” “divorced parents” “5’9”” “hates being lazy” “has no motivation in life” “encourages” “just doesn’t push me to do better” “confident” “fear of rejection” “can be dramatic” “talks loudly”

Note: ∗ Additional themes discovered from supportive person data.

4.3%), whereas students wrote comments such as “My sister is very supportive” (n = 17; 0.7%) when describing a supportive person. While comments indicating a person is “supportive” or “unsupportive” counted as a tautology for all data, comments generically referring to listening were counted as a tautology only with the (un)supportive listener data; listening was a separate category for the (un)supportive person data (n = 63; 2.6%). From the data remaining after excluding tautological thought units, 17 substantive thematic categories emerged that describe the various behaviors, orientations, and attitudes of supportive/unsupportive persons and listeners (see Table 1 for themes and Figure 1 for how


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TABLE 2 Frequencies and Percent of Responses for Each Category by Dataset


(Un)Supportive Person

Self/Other Understanding Honesty/Trust Intelligence Friendly/Sociable Involvement Verbal Nonverbal Signals Similarity Faith, Beliefs Listening Positivity/Negativity Demographics Lazy Encourages Self-Confidence Loud/dramatic Tautological Units Uncodeable Total Thought Units+

(Un)Supportive Listener

Frequency

Percent (%)

Frequency

Percent (%)

789 127 119 186 282 300 49 25 20 65 63 98 41 17 30 16 6 17 186 2436

32.39 5.21 4.89 7.64 11.58 12.32 2.01 1.03 0.82 2.67 2.59 4.02 1.68 0.70 1.23 0.66 0.25 0.07 7.60 −

707 225 97 112 394 595 196 124 25 60 ∗ N/A 28 44 7 4 6 1 71 401 3097

22.83 7.27 3.13 3.62 12.72 19.21 6.33 4.00 0.81 1.94 N/A 0.90 1.42 0.23 0.13 0.19 0.03 2.29 12.95 −

∗

Note: The “listening” category is merged with the tautology category for the (un)supportive listening data.

themes developed). The first 10 of these categories emerged from the (un)supportive listener responses, while the remaining seven emerged while inductively deriving additional themes from the initially unable-to-be-coded responses in the (un)supportive person data. While the categories in Table 1 capture most responses, there are some responses that simply remain uncodeable (even after several attempts to code them). Thought units that describe a specific individual independent of his or her shared commonalities with other supportive/unsupportive persons/listeners or were too few to constitute a unique thematic category fit in this category. Most thought units, however, fit the identified themes, and frequency counts for each category are listed in Table 2.

DISCUSSION With this article we aimed to discover lay conceptualizations of supportive listeners and to compare these descriptions with those of supportive persons in order to understand the content of mental representations of “supportive people” and “supportive listening” and how these representations overlap and diverge. The discussion that follows explores our tentative answers to the two research questions driving our study then suggests limitations that might motivate future research in this important area.

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How do individuals describe supportive and unsupportive listeners? Our first research question asked how supportive and unsupportive listeners were described. In general and consistent with scholarly descriptions (e.g., Bodie, 2011a; Lipari, 2010; Rhodes, 1993), supportive listeners are described as actively focusing on the concerns of another person in a nonjudgmental way and are seen as generally friendly and likeable. In addition, supportive listeners are described as optimistic, truthful, motivated, understanding, and encouraging, with an identifiable faith/belief system, though responses fitting into these latter categories were not as common. Indeed, judging by the relative frequency of responses within coding category, some characterizations seem to be more central to the constitution of supportive listening. Those categories that captured more than five percent of all responses were self/other focus, involvement, friendly, understanding, and verbal responding. These results mirror quite nicely those reported by Bodie et al. (2012), who suggest that perceptions of listening in initial interactions among college students are primarily driven by the following five attributes: attentiveness, responsiveness, understanding, friendliness, and conversational flow. In other words, when a listener is seen as attentive, responsive, understanding, friendly, and contributing to a good conversational flow, she is more likely to be judged as a “good” listener than if seen, for instance, as humorous, confident, and/or intelligent. A similar pattern seems to have emerged in our data whereby distressed individuals are likely to come away from an interaction thinking their support provider is a good “supportive” listener when that listener was other-focused, involved, friendly, understanding, and engaged in appropriate verbal responding (which likely contributes to a good conversational flow, though that speculation should be tested in future work). One explanation for the similarity in these findings is that when asked to think of what constitutes listening, people (at least college students) are more likely to initially think of contexts more germane to the interpersonal setting such as social support or relational maintenance. If this is the case, then the Bodie et al. article is just as much a description of implicit theories of supportive listening as of listening within initial interactions. In other words, what our results suggest is that the Bodie et al. (2012) model might be portable to other listening contexts than merely initial interactions. The speculation that the interpersonal context is the “default” of young adults was first forwarded by Purdy (2006), and our data also suggest that without a particular context individuals might be most likely to think of interpersonal relationships. Given that listening is a key competency enabling the establishment and maintenance of close relationships, our results are both theoretically and pragmatically useful, though we also acknowledge the need to study listening outside of this context as well.

How do descriptions of (un)supportive listeners compare to descriptions of (un)supportive people? Our second research question asked how descriptions of supportive and unsupportive listeners compare with those of supportive and unsupportive people. In general, the rank order of categories was remarkably similar across the supportive person and supportive listener data. Indeed, the top three categories, the only ones to generate more than 10% of total thought units, were equivalent in both data sets and in the same order of relative importance. Self-other focus, for instance, represented 32.4% of the supportive/unsupportive person responses and 22.8% of the



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supportive/unsupportive listener responses, indicating that the ability of an individual to either focus on others or focus on the self is at the core of describing an individual as either supportive or unsupportive in both contexts. To a certain extent, our results might suggest that supportive listening is the quintessential cognitive category driving impressions of other people as supportive. However, our data also suggest that individual conceptualizations of supportive people and supportive listeners are not completely isomorphic. As Halone and Pecchioni (2001) remarked about “the conceptual domains of ‘listening’ and ‘relational communication,’” we also suggest that supportive listening and supportive people, as cognitive categories, are likely “theoretically conjoined” (p. 65). In particular, comparing the supportive person with the supportive listener data, substantially more responses per capita were generated for self/other focused and positivity/negativity while substantially fewer responses per capita were generated for involvement, verbal responding, and nonverbal responding. Interestingly, the former two categories largely represent impressionistic and general accounts of people, while the latter three categories largely represent molar behaviors. So, for instance, while supportive people are “generally available when needed” (self/other focused), supportive listeners might be more accurately described as “active and involved in particular conversations” (involvement) or not actively involved from the perspective of unsupportive listeners; this involvement is signaled by behaviors from asking questions (verbal) to engaging in appropriate eye contact (nonverbal). Such a finding suggests supportive listening constitutes a subset of specific skills that lead to impressions of others as supportive listeners, in line with some of our prior work (Bodie, Pence, Rold, Chapman, Lejune, & Anzalone, 2011). That is, supportive listening may be best described as a set of behavioral responses most noticeable within individual encounters, whereas other categories (such as supportive persons) may be best thought of as more overarching cognitive categories used to organize various behaviors including supportive listening. Of course, this is mere speculation that should be followed up with systematic empirical scrutiny.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research The findings presented in this article can only be interpreted with an understanding of the limitations surrounding the research study. First, the number of responses unable to be coded using our rubric suggests that descriptions of supportive persons/listeners is complex and diverse; as evidenced by the 17 categories presented in this paper, supportive listeners/people are difficult to categorize in parsimonious or elegant ways. In addition, all data gathered in this study are preliminary in that they were collected with no consideration of various contextual issues likely to influence how we describe others (e.g., support type, relationship type, support preferences). It also must be considered that any differences between the listener and person descriptions may actually be a result of the survey prompts “priming” participants to think about the specific behaviors associated with listening. That is, to suggest these distinctions, although interesting, may not have any practical implications on the understanding of social support and listening. Only future research will be able to answer these speculations. Nonetheless, and irrespective of these and other potential limitations, it appears that notions of supportive persons reflect a broad label designated to a range of general characteristics (e.g., other focused) while the term supportive listener is reserved more for the behavioral activities

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associated with social support and listening in general. Thus, future research could experimentally manipulate both general characteristics of others as well as particular behaviors then test the degree to which these changes can predict outcomes of various molar and molecular levels. Distinctions among various levels of evaluative inference has shown promise in other areas of interpersonal communication scholarship (Spitzberg & Cupach, 2002) and shows promise in the area of supportive communication as well.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank Michelle Pence for assistance with data coding.

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