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Abstract
A growing body of research is focusing on identifying protective factors that may increase the chances of positive psychosocial functioning in adolescents facing adversity. Previous studies documented the role of perceived social support in risky and aggressive behavior and the need for psychometric instruments to assess this variable. The present study aims to validate at linguistic level the Romanian version of Children and Adolescent Social Support Scale (CASSS; Malecki, Demaray, & Elliott, 2000). CASSS is a 60-item measure divided into five subscales, each subscale corresponding to a specific component of the social network (parents, teachers, friends, classmates and school). The scale was piloted for content and general linguistic clarity, following standard methods of linguistic validation. Participants (secondary school students, 13-19 years) completed on-line the Romanian translated version of CASSS. Two weeks later, students filled in the original English version of the scale. A Wilcoxon signed rank test was conducted to determine whether there was a statistically significant difference between the original and translated versions of the instrument. Subsequently, Spearman correlation coefficients were calculated. Psychometric properties of the translated version of CASSS and recommendations are further discussed.
Keywords: social support; adolescents; linguistic validation; protective factors
Introduction
Social support commonly refers to "an individual's perceptions of general support or specific supportive behaviors (available or enacted upon) from people in their social network, which enhances their functioning and/or may buffer them from adverse outcomes" (Malecki & Demaray, 2002, p. 2).
According to Tardy's model (1985), social support is a multidimensional concept consisting in five components, as it follows: (1) the first one is known as direction and it explains that social support is both given and received; (2) the second dimension, disposition, distinguishes between the availability of social support and the actual use of social support; (3) the third dimension, i.e. description / evaluation, concerns the quantity and quality of social support; (4) the content dimension encompasses four types of social support: emotional (e.g. trust, empathy), instrumental (e.g. money, time), informational (e.g. information, advice) and appraisal (e.g. evaluative feedback); (5) the network dimension of social support refers to the source of social support (e.g. parents, teachers, peers) (Tardy, 1985). Each particular dimension of social support can operate differently on certain outcomes for children and adolescents (Demaray...