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The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive measure of social support to include within and across domain support from the organization, supervisor, coworkers, and family for two types of support, emotional, and instrumental.

Four diverse samples were used in an iterative process to develop and provide an initial validation of the 16 dimensions of social support.

The results provide support for the development and initial validation of the 16 dimensions of social support.

A cross-sectional design was used and may be problematic when examining relationships that occur over time. Further, capturing all scales with a single survey could result in common method bias, which may inflate predictive relationships.

A comprehensive measure of social support can assess the differential effect of various types of social support, which can help in identifying unique work-family variables. The multidimensional measure will allow organizations to better diagnose and address performance issues related to a particular type of support.

The study develops a comprehensive measure of social support that can be useful for organizations wanting to diagnose potential support-related issues that may impact important outcomes.

Sociology has a long and ambivalent relationship with the literary and aesthetic form. Commonsense readings of the novel assume its unproblematic structure as a linear narrative. Yet every novel alerts its readers to the constructed nature of social reality and identifies many of the effects of power, privilege, gender, class, desire, resistance, subversion and so on. As such a novel has the capacity to force a confrontation with fundamental, and Jameson (1981) would suggest, enduring human concerns. The novel can strip away a sense of familiarity with everyday habits, and in so doing, it can replicate the sociological process of denaturalization or defamiliarization, and allow the reader to see how ideas come to circulate, dominate and frame the ordinary world. Accordingly, David Lodge comes to the conclusion that “narrative is one of the fundamental human tools for making sense of the world.”

By examining a controversial and much debated novel like American Psycho around which a great deal of social commentary already exists, and by applying the arguments of Lodge, Jameson and others, we understand better how a work of art simultaneously functions as a deconstructive tool of the social. On this basis, when American Psycho generated a great deal of cultural anxiety in the cultural commentators of the day, it suggests that it had succeeded in denaturalizing the world, and in revealing the residual violence in an affluent, comfortable citizenry that was not expected to harbor such hostilities. American Psycho presented a disturbing “symptomatology of the times.” This capacity of the popular novel to inform on the zeitgeist makes an author such as Bret Easton Ellis a maven of our times whose products we should thus incorporate into the conceptual tool kit of any formal human studies.

This paper aims to use the cultural agency theory (CAT) formulated to represent a personality in which multiple identities reside. Dynamic identity theory is used to explain the relationship between the multiple identities, which impact on personality creating imperatives for behaviour. The mindset agency theory (MAT), a development of CAT, is used to evaluate the personal and public identities of Theresa May, the UK Prime Minister in 2017, to determine whether there is a psychological reason for the political inconsistency she demonstrated prior to and during the UK general election campaign.

CAT connects identity and personality theories and is elaborated on conceptually to include the dynamic identity theory, which explains how identities develop. Developing identities result in personality adjustments through trait movements. The theory is applied to Theresa May, the UK Prime Minister in 2017. A selection of her election narratives is taken, and summative content analysis is applied. Her public and personal identities are examined in this way. Data results are tested for reliability, and her public and personal identities are compared using MAT.

Theresa May’s personal and public identities, while related, have some differences, suggesting a clinical explanation for her political inconsistencies.

There is no other current theory that explains the relationship between personality and identity and can evaluate personality using a qualitative–quantitative approach, undertaking a comparative evaluation of multiple identities to explain clinical psychological conditions.