Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support in Indonesian adolescent disaster survivors: A psychometric evaluation

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 15; no. 3; p. e0229958
• Main Authors: Laksmita, Okki Dhona, Chung, Min-Huey, Liao, Yuan-Mei, Chang, Pi-Chen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 13.03.2020; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adaptation, Psychological; Adolescent; Adolescents; Analysis; Biology and Life Sciences; Child; Disaster victims; Disaster Victims - psychology; Disasters; Engineering and Technology; Family; Female; Gender; Health; High schools; Humans; Indonesia - epidemiology; Invariance; Male; Medicine and Health Sciences; Mental health; Nursing schools; Parameters; People and Places; Physical Sciences; Post traumatic stress disorder; Psychometrics; Quantitative psychology; Reliability analysis; Research and Analysis Methods; Schools; Setting (Literature); Social interactions; Social Sciences; Social Support; Students; Survival; Survivors - psychology; Teenagers; Validity; Volcanic eruptions; Youth; Indonesia; China; United States > US; Taiwan
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229958

Social support plays an important role in adolescents' mental health and well-being, and even more so for disaster survivors. To measure the level of social support, one needs an appropriate tool to produce valid and reliable results; therefore, we aimed to measure the invariance across gender groups, and analyze the construct validity and reliability of the Indonesian version of the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), a social support measurement tool which was theoretically constructed and has been well validated in many countries with various cultures and backgrounds. A school-based assessment was conducted in junior and senior high schools in a post-disaster setting in Yogyakarta Province, Indonesia. We analyzed 299 adolescent survivors of a volcanic eruption, aged 12~18 years who completed a 12-item Indonesian version of the MSPSS. The factorial validity confirmed the three-factor structure of the scale (Family, Friends, and Significant Others) which met all of the criteria of parameter indices and provided evidence of high internal consistency reliability. The three-level measurement of invariance, which consisted of configural, metric, and scalar invariance, also performed very well across gender groups with our data and corresponded to the recommended parameters. Our composite reliability values were all fine (>0.7) and indicated that the items in the same construct were strongly correlated and reliable. The Indonesian version of the MSPSS was shown to be a valid, reliable, theoretically constructed, and applicable instrument for adolescent disaster survivors.