Spatial diversity schemes are often used to extract additional performance from wireless communication systems. Incorporating the partial relay selection (PRS) protocol into a distributed switch-and-stay combining (DSSC) cooperative communication network gives the benefit of diversity while simplifying hardware, processing and feedback requirements. Because only a single relay is ever active, the destination employs no combiner; the best relay is chosen based on first-hop relay conditions. However, achieved performance is worse than other distributed protocols, such as distributed selection combining (DSC). In this study, signal space diversity (SSD) is added to the DSSC-PRS system to provide further diversity and error performance gains, at the expense of necessitating a maximum-likelihood detector with increased complexity at the receiver. Analytical results are presented in the form of a lower bound based on the minimum distance lower bound for SSD systems and are verified with simulation. The DSSC-PRS-SSD system shows an improvement of 5 dB at a symbol error rate of 10-4 as well as a clear diversity order improvement. Spectral efficiency of the new system with SSD is slightly decreased at low signal-to-noise ratios, but is still an improvement over other distributed schemes, such as DSC.