Social support in bereavement: Developing and validating a new scale

Abstract

A lthough social support has been considered to be beneficial for the bereaved, mixed findings exist in the literature. This may be due to variations in conceptualising and measuring social support. This study aims to offer a new validated scale for research on social support in bereavement. Part 1 describes the generation of the item pool, which was derived from narratives of 28 bereaved Chinese. Part 2 includes the items selected using item analysis and explanatory factor analysis to form the preliminary version of the Scale of Social Support in Bereavement (SSB) based on data collected from 195 bereaved adults. Part 3 examined the psychometric properties of the newly developed SSB with a sample of another 196 bereaved adults. The results of confirmatory factor analysis indicated a useful structure of four factors, including "living support," "economic support," "grief processing," and "emotion restoration." The convergent validity, internal consistency reliability and test-retest reliability of the measure were shown to be strong. SSB is the first scale which measures comprehensive types of support in bereavement. It can be applied in exploration of the role of social support in bereavement, and validated in different cultural contexts.

Trajectories of Instrumental and Emotional Social Support and the Associated Risk of Mortality in Bereaved Older Adults in Taiwan

“…Social support is often conceptualized based on its structure (i.e., social networks) and function (i.e., exchange activities) (Holt-Lunstad et al, 2010; Magrin et al, 2014; Leahy-Warren, 2014; Mondesir et al, 2018). During or after stressful events, functional social support plays a more crucial role than does its structural counterpart (Barth et al, 2010; Charuvastra & Cloitre, 2008; Cohen, 2004; Li et al, 2022). Functional support can be conceptualized as the perception of an exchange involving a social network (i.e., perceived social support [PSS]) and comprises instrumental and emotional support (Cohen, 2004).…”