The Stress-Buffering Effects of Received Social Support on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among Hurricane Ike Survivors

Hurricane Ike made landfall in the Galveston Bay Area in 2008, destroying parts of the built and natural environment, and leaving survivors with a high prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); however, equally striking was the rapid decline of PTSD among survivors during the 18 months following this disaster. Existing literature suggests that social support tends to either directly or indirectly mitigate such mental health outcomes by moderating disaster-related stress. The present article builds on this to analyze the possible factors contributing to PTSD recovery, including both Ike-related stress suffered by victims and the social support they received over time. We used the Galveston Bay Recovery Study public use file, which includes three waves of interviews for selected victims (n = 658) and employed a series of nested random-effect logistic regression models to test two hypotheses: (a) that social support received by victims buffered the positive relationship between Ike-related stress and PTSD risk and (b) that this buffering effect (BE) diminished over time. Our results provide strong evidence for such BEs (beta = -0.03, p = .009), and, through the use of three-way interaction analysis corrected for multiple testing, we show that the observed BE did indeed diminish over time (p = .045). PTSD resulting from disaster-related stress can be substantially reduced by social support interventions. Policy formulation should focus on early social support interventions, given they are most effective in PTSD recovery.