Despite the undoubted benefits of sport and physical activity, one of the inherent risks that all athletes face, regardless of their competitive level, is injury. Sports injuries, which can range in severity from relatively minor to severe injuries requiring surgical intervention and extended rehabilitation periods, represent a challenging and stressful experience for athletes that can, in extreme circumstances, affect their ongoing health, well-being and performance aspirations (Wadey et al., 2013). It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the prevalence of sports injuries and their potentially negative impact has prompted researchers to explore the effect of an array of psychosocial factors on athletes’ responses to, and recovery from injury. Of these factors, social support has been identified as one of the most adaptive for the recovery process (see Brewer & Redmond, 2016). Within the psychological response literature, the majority of research has been predicated upon the integrated model of response to sport injury (Wiese-Bjornstal et al., 1998). The integrated model of response suggests that pre-injury (personality, history of stressors, coping resources) and post-injury personal (eg, demographic variables, injury type and severity, athletic identity) and situational factors (eg, level of sports participation, social support network, accessibility to rehabilitation) influence the athlete’s cognitive appraisal of injury—which in turn influences athletes’ emotional (eg, frustration, grief, relief) and behavioural responses (eg, adherence to rehabilitation, use/disuse of social support network) to injury and recovery outcome. Within the integrated model, social support is conceptualised as both a situational factor that can influence athletes’ cognitive appraisal of their injury, as well as a behavioural response to injury (eg, use/disuse of social support network). While the more complex mediating and/or moderating relationship between social support and other post-injury variables specified within the integrated model have yet to be examined, a growing body of empirical and professional practice research attests to social support being a significant coping resource (eg, Johnston & Carroll, 1998), with high levels of social support associated with less psychological distress (Rees et al., 2010) and greater rehabilitation adherence (Duda et al., 1989). However, not all research has provided support for these beneficial effects, with some research suggesting that when the provision of social support is inappropriate or ineffective, it can have detrimental effects on athletes’ rehabilitation and recovery (eg, Abgarov et al., 2012). Such equivocal findings are not unique to the sport injury context, rather they highlight the complexity of social support as a multidimensional construct (Freeman, 2020).

In a seminal paper, Bianco and Eklund (2001) attempted to deconstruct some of the complexity of social support for those interested in conducting psychology of sport injury research. In it, the authors wrote “Social support theorists have claimed that much of the confusion surrounding social support stems from the complexity of the construct coupled with a lack of conceptually driven research”(p. 86). Unfortunately, 20 years on, despite a proliferation of psychology of sport injury research within the ensuing period, little has changed; few have heeded Bianco and Eklund’s recommendations and confusion around social support in an injury context remains. Within their review, Bianco and Eklund (2001) identified three major conceptual issues, namely the differences between (a) support activities and support messages,(b) perceived support and received support, and (c) support networks, support exchanges, and�…