Dyadic support exchange, affective well-being and HIV/AIDS stigma: A daily diary study of intimate couples of people living with HIV

Stigmatization related to HIV/AIDS is considered a major source of individual psychological distress and low well-being, but also from a global perspective, it is considered a key barrier to effectively combating the HIV epidemic worldwide. Struggling with chronic illness poses high psychological distress not only for the patients but also for their close ones who often play the role of informal caregivers. In such a situation, the mutual exchange of social support plays a key role in the functioning of both people. However, research on everyday receiving and providing support in intimate relationships during illness is still rare. Providing support on a daily basis may be particularly important for patients because it may increase their sense of self-efficacy and self-esteem despite the disease, which is consistent with the general theory of social support enhancing self-esteem.

The main goal of this project is to examine the links between subjectively-evaluated daily social support, both provided and received, affective well-being, and daily experience of HIV/AIDS-related stigma in relationships affected by HIV.

To examine the mechanisms of social support exchange on fluctuations in daily affect and daily stigmatization we plan to use innovative psychological measurement, namely dyadic intensive longitudinal measurement. Daily online measurements will include assessments of social support, stigma, and affective well-being for both partners forming the dyad, irrespective of their serodiscordant (one partner lives with HIV) or seroconcordant status (both partners live with HIV). In total, the online diary will take less than 7 minutes to complete and will run for 3 weeks, with participants in each dyad completing online, time-stamped questionnaires sent to their mobile phones or email boxes every evening.

The potential benefits resulted from this research project are of not only epistemological, but also practical nature.

1. Our review of existing literature indicates that our study will be the first to examine social support exchange, affective well-being and HIV/AIDS stigma in the daily dyadic research design.
2. Our project is founded on a solid theoretical foundation, and as such, may provide new knowledge in health and clinical psychology on the mechanisms of social support exchange in chronic illness.
3. We plan to co-operate with the non-governmental organization in Poland helping PLWH.
4. It is intended that the findings will also have applications in clinical counseling.

Furthermore, this is our most recent project in this thematic area, carried out under the cooperation agreement between the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Warsaw and the Institute of Psychology at SWPS University. Our goal is, as with the previous projects, to contribute to establishing the leading position of both institutions in the field of psychology through high-quality scientific publications.