Further development of the Norbeck Social Support Questionnaire: normative data and validity testing.

This article describes the second phase of testing the Norbeck Social Support Questionnaire (NSSQ), an instrument designed to measure multiple dimensions of social support. Three studies were conducted to provide a normative data base and to further test validity. In the first study, data from 136 employed adults were obtained. The amount and type of support available for a functioning group of male and female respondents and sources of support for this sample are described. In the second and third studies, the instrument was found to be very stable over a seven-month interval and sensitive to changes within the social support networks of a group of graduate students during their first year of study. Construct validity of the instrument was established by comparing convergent and discriminant constructs to the NSSQ. Concurrent validity with another social support questionnaire was demonstrated. Predictive validity was tested in a sample of 53 graduate students through assessing the buffering effect of social support on measures of negative mood following life stress. Two NSSQ subscales, aid and duration of relationships, had significant interaction effects with life stress on the outcome of negative mood. Duration of relationships also had a significant main effect. After subtracting the main effect for life stress from the overall R2 in the multiple regression analysis, the NSSQ functional support subscales and their interactions with life stress accounted for 19 percent of the variance on negative mood, and the NSSQ network property subscales and their interactions accounted for 20 percent of the variance.

The development of an instrument to measure social support.

This article describes the development of a new instrument, the Norbeck Social Support Questionnaire, designed to measure multiple dimensions of social support. Based on Kahn's (1979) conceptual definitions of social support and definitions from network theory (Barnes, 1972), the instrument has three main variables--Total Functional, Total Network, and Total Loss--each with three subscales. Graduate and undergraduate nursing students were used as subjects in this phase of testing, which established high levels of test-retest reliability and internal consistency. The social desirability response bias was ruled out, and moderate levels of concurrent validity were found. Additional work to establish construct validity is needed. Two groups of students were compared to study the normative trend for this population, and differences were minimal except for recent losses and aid, reflecting the actual situations of the two groups.