Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS)

Multidimensional Scale of Social Support (MSPSS) was developed by Zimet, Dahlem, Zimet, and Farley (1988). The scale was composed of 12 items designed to measure perceived social support acquired from three sources, namely family, friends, and significant others. Higher scores on the scale indicate high levels of social support perception. The MSPSS is a 7–point Likert type scale ranging from 1 (very strongly disagree) to 7 (very strongly agree) and it has 3 subscales, each containing 4 items. In the original scale, the reliability of the total scale was reported as .88, and the internal reliability coefficients of the subscales of significant other (α = .91), family (α = .87), and friends (α = .85) were statistically good (Zimet et al., 1988).

The Turkish adaptation of Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support was conducted by Eker and Arkar (1995), and Eker, Arkar, and Yaldız (2001). The research was conducted in three different samples namely, psychiatricinpatients, patients who had a surgical operation, and randomly selected patient visitors. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of the scale for each sample were found to be .86, .91, and .83, respectively (Eker et al., 2001).

In the present study, the MSPSS was used to assess the perceived social support of traffic accident survivors in Turkey. In this study, the total social support score was used. The Cronbach’s alpha reliability of the whole scale was .95 (See Appendix G for the MSPSS).