Examination of the validity of the social support survey using confirmatory factor analysis

The Social Support Survey (SSS), validated by Richman, Rosenfeld, and Hardy (1993), is a multidimensional self-report measure of social support tested With student athletes. The SSS contains eight dimensions of support. For e ach dimension of support the same four questions are posed. The SSS could, therefore, be scored in two ways: (a) to derive a score for the support dim ensions; (b) to derive a score for the questions posed across all eight sup port dimensions. Confirmatory factor analyses of the SSS on 416 university athletes revealed poor fits to models for both the eight support dimensions and the four questions across all eight dimensions. This problem a,ns clar ified by using a multitrait-multimethod model, which led to improved model fit but revealed that most of the SSS items were two-dimensional. Caution s hould, therefore, be exercised in using the SSS as a measure of multidimens ional social support.