VALIDITY OF CONTENTS OF THE BRAZILIAN VERSION OF THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALE OF PERCEIVED SOCIAL SUPPORT (MSPSS)

Abstract

The social support is a complex and dynamic process involving transactions between subjects and their social networks, promoting and complementing individual resources to coping new demands. To evaluate the social support, has been seen an increasing interest in the use of the Multidimensional Scale of the perceived Social Support (MSPSS). This scale has already been adapted for various countries and has shown satisfactory psychometric properties. Based on these aspects, this research had as objective to promote cross-cultural adaptation of the MSPSS scale into Brazilian Portuguese. For this purpose, the following equivalence steps were fulfilled: conceptual, of items, semantics and operational (pre-teste). In the pre-teste was applied the MSPSS synthesis version to 39 pregnant women. As a result, was ascertained that the MSPSS is scale of easy comprehension and handling, with maintenance of the 12 items, indicating that the scale is suitable for use in later stage in a larger population sample to ascertain other psychometric evidences.