社會支持
Social support theories and models were prevalent as intensive academic studies in the 1980s and 1990s, and are linked to the development of caregiver and payment models, and community delivery systems in the US and around the world. Two main models have been proposed to describe the link between social support and health: the buffering hypothesis and the direct effects hypothesis. Gender and cultural differences in social support have been found in fields such as education "which may not control for age, disability, income and social status, ethnic and racial, or other significant factors".