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Psychometric Evaluation of the Brief 2-Way Social Support Scale Among Malaysian Older Adults

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Abstract

The Brief 2-Way Social Support Scale (SSS) is a newly developed measure of four dimensions of social support: (i) giving emotional support, (ii) receiving emotional support, (iii) giving instrumental support, and (iv) receiving instrumental support. To date, there is limited study on the psychometric qualities of the Brief 2-Way SSS. The current study explored the composite reliability and validity of the original Brief 2-Way SSS in a sample of Malaysian older adults aged 60 and above. In contrast to the past findings, confirmatory factor analysis on 249 valid responses recommends a second-order model consists of one general factor of social support and four first-order factors outperformed other competing models. The scale also showed good reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. Moreover, concurrent validity was evident by the positive relationship between the Brief 2-Way SSS scores and life satisfaction. The findings support that the scale is an adequate tool to measure the four dimensions of social support for older adults in the Malaysian context. However, more studies are warranted to verify the factorial structure before considering the scale for cross-cultural studies.

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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank undergraduate research students Visshan A/L Miyanathan, Sarvinna A/P Vasuthevan, and Britney Bong Sue Fun for helping in data collection.

Funding

This study is funded by Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR Research Fund, number 6200/SA2) in Malaysia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Counselling, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), 31900, Kampar, Malaysia

    Sonia Khodabakhsh & Chee Seng Tan

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  1. Sonia Khodabakhsh
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  2. Chee Seng Tan
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Contributions

All authors have contributed significantly, and that all authors agree with the content of the manuscript. Conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, data collection and screening, writing—original draft preparation, and review was done by Sonia Khodabakhsh. Formal data analysis and investigation, writing—original draft preparation of results and discussions, and reviewing the final report was done by Chee Seng Tan.

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Correspondence to Sonia Khodabakhsh.

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The research approval was obtained from the Scientific and Ethical Review Committee of Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (Re: U/SERC/32/2020), Malaysia.

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Written consent was obtained from individuals who participated in this study.

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Khodabakhsh, S., Tan, C.S. Psychometric Evaluation of the Brief 2-Way Social Support Scale Among Malaysian Older Adults. Trends in Psychol. 30, 97–110 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-021-00097-9

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