Psychometric Properties of the Functional Social Support Domain of Perinatal Infant Care Social Support

Abstract

Objective. To determine the face, content, constructvalidity, and reliability of the functional social supportdomain of Perinatal Infant Care Social Support (PICSS)translated into Spanish and adapted for first-time mothersof term babies.
 Methods. Validation study of the functionalsocial support domain of PICSS, which has 22 itemswith response options from 1 to 4; higher scores indicategreater social support. A translation, back-translation, andcultural adaptation process took place along with an expertreview to evaluate face and content validity. In total, 210mothers participated to establish construct validity andthe reliability of the domain. The content validity index andfactor analysis were used to identify the structure of thedomain. Reliability was estimated using Cronbach’s alphacoefficient.
 Results. Linguistic and cultural adaptationswere performed, along with validation and reliability. Face validity for mothers was the following: high comprehension (94%); and forexperts: high comprehension (95.83%), high clarity (96.53%), and high precision(92.82%). In relevance and pertinence, the content validity index was high (0.97).Construct validation identified two factors that explained 76% of the variance of thedomain evaluated: factor 1 “Supporting presence -emotional and appraisal support”(13 items, 39%) and factor 2 “Practical support -informational and instrumentalsupport-” (9 items, 37%). Cronbach’s alpha value was 0.97.
 Conclusion. Given the robust psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the functional socialsupport domain of PICSS, this may be used to identify the functional social supportin the mothers.