Table 1.

Summary of included studies.

Author/Year	Context (Study Site)	Project (Design)	Aim of Study	Tools	Group of Subjects		Statistical Analysis
					Patients	Caregivers
Ayik et al. [23] 2022	Patients hospitalised in the oncology (medical and radiation oncology) clinic in a university hospital in eastern Turkey	A cross-sectional design	To find out the interrelation between the quality of life and social support of cancer patients and caregivers.	Patient and Caregiver Identification Questionnaire, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, Rolls Royce Quality of Life Scale	318	318	Descriptive statistics, the Kruskal–Wallis, the ANOVA, and the Pearson’s correlation test; the level of error was accepted as a p-value of <0.05.
Boeding et al. [24] 2014	Couples were recruited from two major medical centres in the context of a larger treatment-outcome study. USA	A cross-sectional design	To examine the ways in which a woman’s daily mood, pain, fatigue, and her spouse’s marital satisfaction predict the woman’s report of partner support in the context of breast cancer.	Source-Specific Social Provisions Scale, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, Brief Pain Inventory, Brief Fatigue Inventory, Baseline Measure: Quality of Marriage Index	158	159	Multilevel modelling (MLM) was used following the guidelines put forth by Raudenbush and Bryk (2002) in order to evaluate the effects of women’s pain, fatigue, and mood and men’s marital satisfaction on the amount of social support provided to women with breast cancer over a span of 30 days.
Chen et al. [25] 2021	First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University and the First Affiliated Hospital of University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui province.	A cross-sectional design	To examine the impact of family resilience on the individual resilience of couples during cancer and explore the potential mediating role of perceived social support and the moderating role of sex in this association in cancer patient-spouse dyads.	Family Resilience Assessment Scale, Perceived Social Support Scale, Resilience Scale	272	272	Descriptive Statistics, Pearson’s correlations, the mediation of their own and their partners’ perceived social support, and the actor–partner independence mediation model (APIMeM).
Dębska et al. [26] 2017	The Centre of Oncology, M. Skłodowska-Curie Memorial Institute in Cracow and at the St. Luke Provincial Hospital in Tarnów. Poland	A cross-sectional self-inventory study	To determine the level and sources of support available for cancer patients and their close relatives.	Berlin Social Support Scales and a sociodemographic-clinical survey	193	193	Student t-test and ANOVA (with LSD post-hoc test), Cohen’s d-coefficients. The power and direction of associations within pairs of variables were determined on the basis of Kendall’s tau-b coefficients of linear correlation.
Goldzweig et al. [27] 2016	The Institute of Oncology at Hadassah University Hospital; patients from various geographic regions of Israel were targeted. Israel, Austria	A cross-sectional study	To assess relationships between oldest andold (minimum 86 years) patients’ perceived social support with their own and their spousal caregivers’ hope through the application of the actor–partner interdependence model (APIM).	Social support, the Cancer Perceived Agents of Social Support, Geriatric Depression Scale, the distress thermometer, the Adult Hope Scale	58	58	Paired t-tests after establishing an interaction between role and gender and validating significant results in multi-analysis of variance [MANOVA] overall variables. Pearson’s zero-order correlation coefficients; the SPSS (version 21.0; IBM Corp. NY, USA) software.
Hasson-Ohayon et al. [28] 2014	Hadassah University Hospital, Jerusalem, Israel. Israel, USA	A cross-sectional study	To compare the relationship between social support, hope, and depression among different age groups of women with advanced breast cancer and their healthy spouses.	Cancer perceived agents of social support, the brief symptom inventory (BSI), the Adult Hope Scale	150	150	Descriptive statistics, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and structural equation modelling (SEM).
Jeong et al. [29] 2017	Gastric cancer patients and their family caregivers who visited a university medical centre. South Korea	A cross-sectional study	To investigate the moderating role of social support on the psychological well-being of both cancer patients and family caregivers.	Duke-UNC Functional Social Support Questionnaire, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale	52	36	Hierarchical multiple regression analyses.
Law et al. [30] 2018	The Radiation Oncology Department at The Canberra Hospital. Canberra, Australia	qualitative study	To gain an in-depth understanding of CRC patients’ and caregivers’ experience of social support within the cancer treatment setting.	Individual interviews	22	22	The framework approach, qualitative content analysis, consisted of five interconnected stages linked to forming a methodical and rigorous audit trail.
Pasek et al. [31] 2022	Patients were in the chemotherapy and radiotherapy wards of oncology hospitals in Poland, and their caregivers Poland	Across-sectional study	To investigate the factors influencing the multidimensional aspect of social support in a cancer patient-informal caregiver dyad.	Standardised: BSSS, POS, SSCS, TIPI, ET, SPT, the authors’ own tool for sociodemographic assessment.	170	170	Descriptive statistics, non-parametric Mann–Whitney U test, multiple regression analysis using the stepwise progressive method, analysis of the distribution of residuals.
Pasek et al. [10] 2017	Patients in the chemotherapy and radiotherapy wards of oncology hospitals in Poland and their caregivers. Poland	A cross-sectional study	To analyse interrelationships between perceived support and the SOC in caregivers, and perceived support, the SOC, and acceptance of illness in cancer patients.	Standardised: BSSS, AIS, SOC-29, the authors’ own tool for sociodemographic assessment.	80	80	Descriptive statistics, analyses using Student’s t-test, Cohen’s d coefficient, analysis of r-Pearson’s correlation coefficients, serial bootstrapping mediation analysis—PROCESS macro for SPSS.
Sterba et al. [32] 2017	The study was conducted at a head and neck cancer (HNC) clinic in a regional cancer centre. The interested participants nominated primary caregivers, the person they reported relying on most for cancer-related support. USA	A cross-sectional study	To examine the physical and emotional well-being and social support in newly diagnosed HNC patients and caregivers and identify sociodemographic, clinical, and behavioural risk factors associated with compromised well-being in patients and caregivers.	The Short Form Health Survey (SF-12), open-ended questions so participants could respond in their own words, the MD Anderson Symptom Inventory tool for sociodemographic assessment	72	72	Descriptive statistics, ANOVAs and Fisher’s exact tests for continuous and categorical variables, respectively (p < 0.05).
Surucu et al. [33] 2017	University Hospital’s Gynaecologic Oncology service in Southern Turkey.	A cross-sectional study	To analyse the level of perceived social support and hope of cancer patients and their families.	Patient Social Support Form and Family Social Support Form, the Beck Hopelessness Scale	69	69	Arithmetic average, standard deviation, Mann–Whitney U test, Kruskal–Wallis test, Spearman–Brown correlation analysis.
Uslu-Sahan [34] 2018	Patients with gynaecologic cancer and their caregivers at one university hospital in Ankara, Turkey.	A cross-sectional study	To determine whether hospitalised patients with gynaecologic cancer and their caregivers differ in feelings of hopelessness and death anxiety and how those conditions may be related to their social support.	Patient Information Form, Caregiver Information Form, the Multidimensional Perceived Social Support Scale, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, the Thorson-Powell’s Death Anxiety Scale (DAS)	200	200	Student’s t-test, Pearson’s correlation test, and linear regression analyses. The data were analysed using the SPSS version 20 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA).