Transcultural adaptation of the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) to Portuguese (Brazil).
social support, cross-cultural adaptation, pre-teste, psychological assessment.
The social support is understood as a complex and dynamic process involving transactions between subjects and their social networks, complementing and promoting the individual resources they have to meet new demands. For the social support measurement, has been seen an increasing interest in the use of the Multidimensional Scale of the perceived Social Support (MSPSS), that was developed in the United States by Zimet, Dahlem, Zimet, e Farley (1988). This scale has already been adapted for several countries and presented satisfactory psychometric properties. Taking as basis these aspects, this descriptive, cross-line and cross-cultural adaptation search has aimed to promote the cross-cultural adaptation of the MSPSS scale into Brazilian Portuguese. To this end, the next equivalence steps were fulfilled: conceptual, of items, semantics and operational (pre-teste). And measurement. In operational equivalence, the MSPSS summary version was applied to 39 pregnant women. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO), Barlett's sphericity test, factorial analysis, and the Cronbach's alpha were used in the measurement equivalence. All equivalences were performed with the objective of adapting MSPSS to Brazil. As a result, it was found that MSPSS was loaded in only 2 factors (family and friends) and that it is a scale of easy handling and understanding, so that the 12 items remained, according to the values obtained in the equivalences, indicating that the is suitable for use in future psychometric studies.