Perceived Social Support, Personality and Self-Esteem in Emerging Adulthood: An Integrative Review and an Agenda for Nigerian Research

Abstract

This review integrates them and argues that the field's dominant measurement practices have systematically attenuated its estimates. Three claims are advanced. First, the routine use of total perceived-support scores obscures source-specific effects, and the available evidence indicates that family, peer and significant-other support do not operate equivalently, in some studies working in opposite directions. Second, the abbreviated personality inventories on which much of this work depends perform unevenly outside the populations in which they were constructed, and reliability failures in non-Western samples are more common than the published record suggests, because such studies are less likely to reach print. Third, personality and support are not independent predictors set side by side, as they are usually modelled, but are plausibly sequential, with dispositional tendencies shaping the support a person perceives and support in turn shaping self-evaluation. A mediational reading of the existing findings is proposed on this basis. The Nigerian evidence base is then examined and found to be close to empty, notwithstanding features of the Nigerian context, including normative extended-family obligation and near-universal congregational membership, that make it a theoretically informative rather than merely an additional setting.