way spousal support measured in this survey. While our study conceptualized spousal support as single general construct, there are many types of spousal support including instrumental (e.g. directly helping with a problem), emotional (e.g. showing empathy and giving reassurance), informational (e.g. giving advice or suggestions), and appraisal (e.g. passing along information for evaluation; Tardy 1985). Upon closer investigation, the four questions that were used to construct our measure of spousal support seem to be primarily measures of emotional spousal support. Three of the four questions (How much does your (spouse/partner) really care about you? How much does your (spouse/partner) understand the way you feel about things? How much can you open up to your (spouse/partner) if you need to talk about your worries?) gauge how well one’s spouse/partner responds to emotional needs.  Only one of the questions (How much can you rely on your (spouse/partner) for help if you have a serious problem?) could be construed as a measure of instrumental or informational support. Therefore, the results of our study may indicate that emotional spousal support does not influence the relationship between English proficiency and health. From a practical point of view, it is not hard to see why this might be the case. While emotional spousal support may temporarily help to relieve the stress associated with limited English proficiency, long-term stress relief can only be accomplished by instrumental (e.g. helping spouse/partner enroll in English classes) or informational (e.g. giving spouse/ partner information on how to find a conversation partner) support.
Accordingly, one of the limitations of this study is the lack of dif-
ferentiation between different types of spousal support. Future studies should consider using more specific measures of spousal support that can discern between the different types of support and then consider each type in turn. Another limitation of this study is that all measures in this study were based on self-report. While self-reported measures are usually fairly reliable and correspond well with objective measures, they are subject to social desirability effects and other biases. Unlike other studies that used diagnosis of mental/ Excellence in Upper-Level Writing 2012 129