How Social Support Enhances Individual Resilience in the Public Health Crisis: Testing a Dual-Process Serial Mediation Model

Under the background of the COVID-19 pandemic, our paper attempts to advance a dual-process model from online social support to individual resilience via diverse social capital (bonding and bridging) and political beliefs (political efficacy, political trust and city identification). Drawing on a survey of 446 residents in Shanghai, China, the findings indicate that neither informational nor emotional social support directly affects individual resilience, but indirectly influences it through different pathways. Specifically, bridging social capital mediates informational social support and individual resilience, but bonding social capital might not follow a similar path. Notably, political efficacy and political trust are involved in the above mediation between informational social support and individual resilience. Besides, the serial mediation effect of emotional social support on individual resilience via bonding social capital and then city identification or political trust is also significant. Our findings are expected to guide people to better recover from the current public health crisis and prepare for the future wave.